Once or twice this strange trail led him through thickets where the bushes grew so high as to lash his face. He came to regard slippery, projecting roots and rough stones, which galled his feet, protected only by the thin soles of his moccasins, as matters of course. His wind decreased, and his blessings ceased. Yet he followed on, walking, walking, interminably walking, with now and again an interval of climbing or stumbling headlong, accompanied by ejaculations of thankfulness that his gun was not loaded.
His breath came in hot, strangling gasps, the veins in his head were swollen and stinging like whipcords, there was a dull, pounding noise in his ears, and a drumming at his heart. He confessed that he was thoroughly “winded” when he had been following the trail for nearly two hours, so he seated himself upon a withered stump beside it to rest.
He had relinquished the idea that the track would bring him out near Uncle Eb’s camp. Had it led thither, he would have rejoined his comrades long before this. His only hope now was that by patiently following it on he might reach the camp of some other traveller, or the lonely log cabin of a pioneer farmer. He had heard of such farm-settlements being scattered here and there on forest clearings.
So presently Dol Farrar got to his feet again, when he had recovered breath and strength, and told himself pluckily that “he wasn’t going to knock under,” that “he had been in bad scrapes before now, and had not shown the white feather.” He gritted his teeth, and resolved that he would not show that craven pinion, even in the desperate solitude of these baffling woods where no eye could see his weakness. He did not want to have a secret, humiliating memory by and by that he had been faltering and distracted when his life depended on his wits and endurance.
He squared his shoulders sturdily, as if to make the most of the budding manhood that was in him, and trudged ahead. And, indeed, he had need to take his courage in both hands, and force it to stand by him; for he had not gone far when, though the forest still continued dense, he became aware that he was beginning a steep ascent. Was the trail going to lead him up a mountain-side? The way grew yet more rugged. Every step was a misery. Jagged edges of rock and never-ending roots seemed to brand themselves with burning friction upon his feet, through their soft buckskin covering. He tried to hearten himself into a belief that he must soon reach some mountain camp or settlement.
But a bleak horror threw a gray shade upon his face as his staring eyes saw that the trail was growing fainter—fainter—fainter. At the foot of a steep crag, where a mass of earth, stones, and dead spruce-trees showed that there had lately been a landslide on the mountain above, he lost it altogether. It had led him to a pile of rubbish.
Chapter VII.
A Forest Guide-Post
At the foot of that crag Dol stood still, while a great shiver crept from his neck up the back of his head, stirring his hair. He peered in every direction; but there was no sign of a camp, nothing to show that any human foot before his had disturbed the solitude of this mountain-side, and no further marks on the ground, save one impression on a bed of earth at his feet where some animal had lately lain.
The disappointment was stupefying.