"There, sir!" exclaimed the hunter, seizing the trout by the gills, and triumphantly holding it up to view, "there is about what I bargained for: two feet long, not an inch shorter,—seven pounds weight, and not an ounce lighter! Now, being satisfied, I am done."
"What, leave off with such luck?" asked Claud in surprise.
"Yes, young man," said the other, "I hold it all but a downright sin to draw from God's storehouse a single pound more than is really needed. This will last my family as long as it will keep, this warm weather, with the plenty of moose-meat we shall have. Any thing more is a waste, which I will not commit. And you, sir, who have just hauled in your third and largest one, I perceive, and have now nearly as many pounds as I have,—what can you want of more? Come, let us pull up and off for our homes. It is nearly time, any way."
Although loth to break off his sport, yet inwardly acknowledging the justness of the hunter's philosophy, Claud reluctantly drew in and wound up his line, hauled in his anchor, and, handling his oar, shot out abreast of the other, who had already got under way, into the heaving waters of the now agitated lake. Side by side, with the quick and easy dip of their elastic single oars, the rowers now sent their light, sharp canoes, dug out to the thinness of a board from the straight-grained dry pine, rapidly ahead over the broken and subdued waves of the cove, in which they had been stationed, till they rounded the intervening woody point which had cut off the view of the lower end of the lake.
"Good Heavens!" exclaimed Claud, starting back, with suspended oar, as now, coming out in view of the lake, his eye fell on the huge pillar of smoke, which, deeply enshrouding that part of the distant forest lying east of the outlet of the lake with its expanded base, was rolling upward its thousand dark, doubling folds; "good Heavens, Phillips, look yonder! Where and what is it? It looks like a burning city."
"It is a fire, of course, and no small one, either; but where, I can't exactly make out," slowly responded the hunter, intently fixing his keen eyes on the magnificent spectacle which had thus unexpectedly burst on their view in the distance. "Let me see," he continued, running his eye along the border of the lake in search of his old landmarks: "there is the tall stub that stands half a mile down on the west bank of the river, and is now just visible in the edge of the smoke; but where is the king pine, that stands nearly against it, over in your slash? Young man," he added, with a startled air, "was your father calculating to burn that slash to-day?"
"No, unless it looked likely to rain."
"Well it does look likely to rain, in the shape of a shower gathering yonder, which has already given out one or two grumbles of distant thunder, if my ears served me as well as usual."
"Yes; but such a smoke and fire can't come from our slash. It must be a larger and more distant one."
"So I thought at first; but I begin to think different. Do you see that perpendicular, broken line of light, occasionally flashing out from the smoke, and extending upward to a height that no ground fire ever reached? That is your king pine in a blaze from bottom to top. Hark! why, I can hear it roaring clear here, like a distant hurricane. It must be a prodigious hot fire to make all that show and noise."