“Thar! thet’s all I kin remember,” he declared.
It was one of those old lumberjack songs that had come from no one knew where. As far as Joe knew, this favorite backwoods ballad of his had never been written, like scores of others gleaned out of the lumber camps.
But it was growing late, and both were drowsy after their long tramp. The fire had sunk to embers. They stacked it up for the night with the remaining niggered ends of the dry balsams, and before another five minutes had elapsed the two were rolled up and snoring in their blankets. Then all was still, save that at intervals the owl hooted hoarsely from across the pond, or a muskrat plunged down by the landing, close to their boat. When they awoke, the warm sun was streaming in upon them, and the pond, still as a plate of glass, lay under a blanket of rosy mist. That night Joe had dreamed of Sue.
To Joe the still water at the head of the pond had a strange fascination, a silent stream, black as onyx, its current bordered by the deep forest of spruce and pine, with now and then a giant hemlock, centuries old, lifting its shaggy top above them. So perfectly were the trees mirrored in the stream that it was often difficult to tell where the water-line began.
The stream this year was swarming with trout; seldom had its gravelled spawning beds yielded better fishing. Here, too, the deer came to drink. At night the winding stream became ghostly and as silent as death, save now and then the slosh of a leaping trout or the plunge of a muskrat.
There was something of the unfathomable and the unknown in this weird, lonely river, buried as it was miles back of civilization.
To-night the slim, green boat moved up it, and turned to the right and left in its varied bends, hemmed in by the black trees. The boat, like the two men within it, did not make a sound, and though Ed’s paddle kept constantly in motion under water, he avoided lifting it clear of the current. In the absolute stillness even its drip would have been heard. In the bow where Joe sat in the chill air, with a Winchester across his knees, glowed with a peculiar ghostly light an old-fashioned jack-lantern; back of its stub of a candle Ed had nailed a semicircle of hemlock bark, whose inner slippery peel, white as ivory, served as a reflector, obliterating from view the boat and its occupants. It was an ideal night to float for deer—the moon not yet up.
It was past midnight when they stealthily turned to the right up a stretch of water, swinging along under some alders that shaded in daylight a patch of shallow water with a clean sand bottom. Suddenly Ed’s paddle gently backed water. Joe did not know his paddle had reversed, but he felt an almost imperceptible shake to the green boat, cautiously lifted his rifle, and, peering ahead of him, saw a grayish object close up to the alders. Half a stroke of Ed’s paddle, and he saw more plainly an animal that resembled a sort of phantom horse but was in reality a small spike-horned buck. He had been drinking, and now raised his trim head and stood gazing into the lantern’s ghostly light. Like a flash he started to spring to the bank, but Joe was too quick for him; down he went with a shot that broke his neck.
“By goll, Joe, you done well,” came Ed’s quiet remark, as together they lifted the deer in the boat and started for camp. They had barely reached the Gull rock when the moon rose, flooding the pond with its soft radiance, changing the chill low-lying mist to a silvery veil.