The fire continued to flare, and occasionally it popped, but no more embers left the chimney. The snow came down gently and settled on the frame of the window until the little panes became round from the clinging white flakes. The wind was rising slightly, and now and then a puff came down the chimney and caused the fire to leap and twist upward.
The slumbers of the mystery hunters were rudely broken into by a sudden medley of shots and yells. The boys woke up with a start, and as they did so two more shots rang out. Then stillness succeeded.
“What was that?” Barry asked, as they sat up in the bags and looked around in the semigloom. The fire had sunk down, and a glance at an old alarm clock that Kent had brought with him, and which stood on the stone chimneypiece, showed that it was a quarter of two.
“Shots,” was Kent’s answer, as he kicked his way out of the bag. “Several of them, and close to here, too.”
“I heard some yells,” put in Tim.
All four of them were now up and hastening into their clothes. Mac swiftly tossed some wood on the fire, and in the increasing light they hurriedly dressed. Barry peered out of the window as he pulled his sweater down.
“I don’t see anybody,” he said. “It is still snowing.”
Kent took his rifle from a nail upon which he had hung it, and handed Barry his. “I guess we had better take these with us,” he said. “No knowing who is out there, shooting around.”
“From the yells we heard, it sounds as though somebody was winged,” Mac said, as he took the shotgun that the twins shared between them. Tim placed his ax in his belt, and they were ready to go out into the night and investigate.
Barry opened the door, and they stepped out. It was still snowing, but the flakes were finer now, and there was a brisk wind that moaned through the tops of the trees and whipped the snow into whirling shapes and formations. The boys left the cabin cautiously, but no one challenged their coming, and they stood in the snow outside the door, their hands in pockets, feeling the change from the warm inside to the cold outdoors. Much snow had fallen since they had gone to bed.