“Speaking of game,” Larry whispered; and then: “Keep perfectly still until we see what it is.” And, as a measure of safety, he reached cautiously for the short-handled axe.
They did not have to wait long. In a moment there was a little stir in the thicket and the balls of fire began to move slowly. Larry, more wood-wise than his bedmate, knew that what they were seeing were the eyes of some animal that had been attracted by the light of the camp-fire, but he couldn’t tell what it was. If it should happen to be a bear, lean and famished from its winter hibernation—as Larry well knew, there were still grizzlies to be found in the Hophras.... But at this point he pulled himself together and let good old common sense get in its word. The eyes were too high up from the ground to be those of a bear, unless the animal were standing upon its hind legs, and, besides, they were too large to figure as the little pig-like eyes of any kind of a bear, even a grizzly.
While they kept perfectly still and looked, the animal to which the eyes belonged came out of the thicket and advanced cautiously to the water’s edge. It proved to be a mule-deer, a full-grown buck, easily recognizable by its large ears, brown-and-white face, and short, black-tipped tail. After staring fixedly at the camp-fire for a few moments, it drank at the stream and then moved away, vanishing as silently as it had come.
“Gee!” said Purdick, as the deer disappeared, “are they as tame as all that?”
“Tame enough, when they don’t get the human scent,” Larry replied. “The wind was wrong for him. Dick and I saw them often last summer in the Tourmaline. How about the fire? Are you sleeping warm enough?”
“Toasty,” Purdick asserted, and with that they burrowed again.
The dawn was breaking golden in the upper air when they turned out the next morning and Larry regretfully dipped water with his hat to extinguish the splendid bed of coals that should have figured as their breakfast fire.
“It’s a rotten shame to spoil a fire as good as this,” he said, “but we haven’t anything to cook on it.”
“How many miles to breakfast?” Purdick asked.