"Why simply that I have killed the biggest black bear I ever saw or heard of in these mountains."
"Where is it?" eagerly asked Jack, who had a great longing for fresh meat for breakfast that morning.
"It's out there just beyond the picket lines, and some of you must go after it. You see the mountaineers who 'held me up' and then made friends with me, agreed to bring it to camp under my solemn promise of safe conduct. Bill Jones was at the head of them. But as they drew near the camp and saw the pickets, their courage failed them and even my invitation to come and breakfast with us, could not entice them within the picket lines.
"'We don't want to take no risks,' they said, 'an' you kin bring out some fellers to git the bar, so ef you don't mind, we'll leave it right here an' say good mornin'.' And with that they scurried off up the mountain."
Jack, Harry, Ed and Jim volunteered to go out after the bear, and with no little difficulty they at last got him to camp, where they proceeded to dress him. Tom, in the meantime, ate such breakfast as there was on hand, and, rolling himself in his blanket, stretched his tired limbs before the fire and fell at once into slumber. The other boys left him asleep when they went to their work, but considerably before noon he joined them with his axe.
That night a "council of war," as they called it, was held.
"Now that our house is burned up," said Jack, "we may as well begin to get ready for our descent of the mountain. Of course, we could sleep out of doors in this spring weather, but there is no use in doing it longer than we must. We sent the last two bridge timbers down the chute to-day. We have only twenty more ties to get ready and if we work hard we can do that to-morrow and next day. That will leave us nothing more to do except to work up the waste into cordwood and send it down. My calculation is that we can leave here one week from to-morrow morning if we are reasonably industrious. Tom's bear and the other game he'll get, will keep us in meat for that time, and if the Doctor can leave his patients a week hence, we'll go."
"Oh, as to that," said the Doctor, "I could leave them now. They need nothing now but nursing, and it won't be very long after we leave before the road will be open for the lieutenant to send them all down the mountain."
Thus with glad thoughts of a speedy homing, the boys rolled themselves in their blankets and stretched themselves out to sleep by the fire and under the stars.
"By the way, Tom," said Jim, just as Tom was sinking into slumber, "you forgot to look for that hole in the sky that you made last night."