When the pine at last tumbled earthward with a thud which reverberated for miles through the forest, he gave a mighty yell, waved his skin cap, and came towards the visitors.
“Hulloa, Lin!” boomed the doctor, greeting this native as an old acquaintance.
“Hello, Doc!” answered Lin. “By the great horn spoon! I didn’t expect to see you here. Who are these fellers?”
The doctor introduced his comrades. Lin greeted them with bluff simplicity, and called them one and all by their Christian names as soon as these could be found out. Doc alone came in for his short title—if such it could be called. Luckily the campers of both nationalities, from Cyrus downward, were without any element of snobbery in their dispositions. It seemed to them only a jolly part of the untrammelled forest life that man should go back to his primitive relations with his brother man; that in the woods, as Doc said, “manhood should be the only passport,” and that titles and distinctions should never be thought of by guides or anybody else. They were well-pleased to be taken simply for what they were,—jolly, companionable fellows,—and to be valued according to the amount of grit and good-temper they showed.
And they learned this morning to appreciate the pioneer courage and resolute spirit of the rugged settlers who had cleared a home for themselves amid the surrounding wilderness of forest and stream. Their roughness of speech was as nothing in comparison with their brave endurance of hardships, their deeds of heroism, and their free-handed hospitality.
Lin led his visitors straight to a log cabin, before which his father, a veteran woodsman, who bore the scars of bears’ teeth upon his body, was digging and planting. This old farmer, too, greeted Doc as a friend, and when the wagon was talked about, was quite willing to do anything to serve him.
“But ye must have a square meal afore ye travel,” he said. “Jerusha! I couldn’t let ye go without eatin’. Mother!” shouting to his wife, who was inside the cabin. “Say, Mother! Ha’n’t ye got somethin’ fer these fellers to munch?”
Forthwith a big, rosy woman, who had herself fought a bear in her time, and had shot him, too, before he attacked her farmyard, hustled round, and got up such a meal as the travellers had not tasted since they entered the woods. They had a splendid “tuck-in,” consisting of fried ham, boiled eggs, potatoes, hot bread, yellow butter, and coffee. And the meal was accompanied with thrilling stories from the lips of the old settler about the hardships and desperate scenes of earlier pioneering days. Doc coaxed him to relate these for the boys’ benefit. And many eyes dilated as he told of blood-curdling adventures with the “lunk soos,” or “Indian devil,” the dreadful catamount or panther, which was once the terror of Maine woodsmen.
“So help me! I’d a heap sooner meet a ragin’ lion than a panther,” said the old man. “My own father came near to bein’ eaten alive by one when I was a kid. He was workin’ with a gang o’ lumbermen in these forests at timber-makin’, and was returnin’ to their camp, when the beast bounced out of a thicket all of a suddint. Poor dad was skeered stiff. The thing screeched,—a screech so turrible that it was enough to turn a man’s sweat to ice-water, an’ a’most set him crazy. Dad hadn’t no gun with him; so he shinned up the nighest tree like mad, an’ hollered fit to bust his windpipe, hopin’ t’other fellers at the camp ’ud hear him.
“But the panther made up another tree hard by, an’ sprang ’pon him. Fust it grabbed dad by the heel. Then it tore a big piece out o’ the calf of his leg, an’ devoured it. Think of it, boys! Them’s the sort o’ dangers that the fust settlers an’ lumbermen in these woods had to face.