They had grave thoughts meanwhile that the old mountain was decidedly gloomy in its omens, first a thunder-storm and then a tragedy; for, rub as they might with brotherly hands, they could not pass their own warmth into the body of the half-breed, though he still lived.
But the mountain had not ended its terrors yet.
Its mumbling lips began to speak, with a threatening, low at first like muttered curses, but swelling into a nameless noise—a rumbling, pounding, creeping, crashing.
“Great Governor’s Ghost! what’s that?” gasped Cyrus, stopping his rubbing. “Pamolah or some other fiend seems to be bombarding us from the top now.”
“It’s more thunder rolling over us,” said Neal; but as he spoke his tongue turned stiff with fear.
“Sounds as if the whole mountain was tumbling to pieces. Perhaps it’s the end of the world,” suggested Dol, as a succession of booming shocks from above seemed to shake the camping-ground under his feet.
There was one second of awful indecision. The boys looked at each other, at the dying man, at the roof above them, in the stiffness of uncertain terror.
Then a figure leaped into their midst, with an armful of dry sticks, which he dashed from him. It was Herb, with the fuel for a fire. And, for the first and last time in his history, so far as these friends of his knew it, there was that big fear in his face which is most terrible when it looks out of the eyes of a naturally brave man.
“Boys, where’s yer senses?” he yelled cuttingly. “Out, for your lives! Run! There’s a slide above us on the mountain!”
“Him?” questioned Cyrus’s stiff lips, as he pointed to the breathing wreck on the spruce boughs. “He’s not dead yet.”