“You poor boy!” cried the sympathetic Dorothy.
Then, moved by a sudden impulse, she threw her arms about his neck and drew him to her—an action which the lad seemed in no way to resent.
The story of their adventure told, Gerald and Jim again sought their sleeping quarters, taking their newly-found friend with them.
Before they went to sleep they induced him to tell his name, which was Len Haley. When they pressed him to know how he came to be alone so far from home, he shook his head and his lip trembled. That, he said, he would tell them in the morning.
Fixing a comfortable place for him, the boys waited until he was sound asleep, before again closing their own eyes. Then, tired from the exertions of the day and night, they, too, dropped off to sleep, to the tune of old Ephraim’s snores.
CHAPTER VII
UNWELCOME VISITORS
While gathered about the breakfast table—if table, it could be called—the next morning, the campers heard the boy’s story. Len Haley had by this time thoroughly recovered from his fright, and he related in a timid, halting fashion how he had come to be alone on the mountain in the dead of night.