He was unconscious probably only for a few minutes. When he came to himself, he found that he was lying, half-submerged in the great drift, on the slope of the mountain, and the dark, icicle-begirt cliff towered high above. He stretched his limbs—no bones broken! He could hardly believe that he had fallen unhurt from those heights. He did not appreciate how gradually the snow had slidden down. Being so densely packed, too, it had buoyed him up, and kept him from dashing against the sharp, jagged edges of the rock. He had lost consciousness in the jar when the moving mass was abruptly arrested by a transverse elevation of the ground. He was still a little dizzy and faint, but otherwise uninjured.
Now a great perplexity took hold on him. How was he to make his way back up the mountain, he asked himself, as he looked at the inaccessible cliffs looming high into the air. All the world around him was unfamiliar. Even his wide wanderings had never brought him into this vast, snowy, trackless wilderness, that stretched out on every side. He would be half the day in finding the valley road that led to Birk's Mill. He rose to his feet, and gazed about him in painful indecision. The next moment a thrill shot through him, to which he was unaccustomed. He had never before shaken except with the cold,—but this was fear.
For he heard voices! Not from the cliffs above,—but from below! Not from the dense growth of young pines on the slope of the mountain,—but from the depths of the earth beneath! He stood motionless, listening intently, his eyes distended, and his heart beating fast.
All silence! Not even the wind stirred in the pine thicket. The snow lay heavy among the dark green branches, and every slender needle was encased in ice. Rick rubbed his eyes. It was no dream. There was the thicket; but whose were the voices that had rung out faintly from beneath it?
A crowd of superstitions surged upon him. He cast an affrighted glance at the ghastly snow-covered woods and sheeted earth. He was remembering fireside legends, horrible enough to raise the hair on a sophisticated, educated boy's head; much more horrible, then, to a young backwoodsman like Rick. On this, the most benign day that ever dawns upon the world, was he led into these endless wastes of forest to be terrified by the "harnts"?
Suddenly those voices from the earth again! One was singing a drunken catch,—it broke into falsetto, and ended with an unmistakable hiccup.
Rick's blood came back with a rush.
"I hev never hearn tell o' the hoobies gittin' boozy!" he said with a laugh. "That's whar they hev got the upper-hand o' humans."
As he gazed again at the thicket, he saw now something that he had been too much agitated to observe before,—a column of dense smoke that rose from far down the declivity, and seemed to make haste to hide itself among the low-hanging boughs of a clump of fir-trees.
"It's somebody's house down thar," was Rick's conclusion. "I kin find out the way to Birk's Mill from the folkses."