“Well, from what I know of human nature,” smiled Wade, “I should think that hay and provisions would stay better overnight in a haunted camp than in one without protection.”
He rapped out his pipe ashes on the hearth of the stove and rose to go.
“And don’t you believe that it was a ha’nt that called out Foolish Abe?” asked Tommy, eager to make a convert. “You saw that for yourself, Mr. Wade.”
“I am afraid to think of what may have happened to that poor creature,” replied Wade, earnestly, looking into the black night through the door that he had opened. He heard the chopping-boss call: “Nine! Turn in!” as he strove with the storm between the main camp and the wangan, and when he stamped into his own shelter the yellow smudge winked out behind him—such is the alacrity of a sleepy woods crew when it has a boss who blows out the big lamp on the dot of the hour. He shuddered as he shut out the blackness. He had no superstitions, but the unaccountable flight of the witling, and the eerie tales offered in explanation and the mystic night of storm in that wild forest waste unstrung him. He went to sleep, finding comfort in the dull glow of the lantern that he left lighted.
Its glimmer in his eyes when the cook called shrilly in the gray dawn, “Grub on ta-a-abe!” sent his first thoughts to the wretch who had abandoned himself to the storm. He hoped to find Abe whittling shavings in the cook-house.
“No, s’r, no sign of him, hide nor hair,” said the cook, shaking his head. “Reckon the ha’nt flew high with him.”
The snow still sifted through the trees—a windless storm now. The forest was trackless.
“For a man to start out in the woods in that storm was like jumpin’ into a hole and pullin’ the hole in after him,” observed the chopping-boss. That remark might have served as the obituary of poor Abe Skeet. The swampers, the choppers, the sled-tenders, the teamsters, trudging away to their work, had their minds full of their duties and their mouths full of other topics during the day.
And all day the cook bleated his cheerful little prophecy in the ears of the cookee: “The tote team will be in by night.” That morning, with his rolling-pin, he had pounded “hungryman’s ratty-too” on the bottom of the last flour-barrel to shake out enough for his batch of biscuits, and he burned up the barrel, even though the pessimistic cookee predicted that “the human nail-kags” would eat both kitchen mechanics if the food gave out.
Dwight Wade, at nightfall, surveyed the bare shelves of the cook camp with some misgivings.