With one more despairing look right and left for that phantom cow which had deluded him, he wheeled around, and crashed back into the forest, tearing away more rapidly than he came.
“He’s off now, and Heaven knows when he’ll stop!” said Herb, breaking the weird spell of silence. “Not till he reaches some lair where nary a creature could follow him. Well, boys, you’ve seen the grandest game on this continent, the king o’ the woods. What do you think of him?”
All tongues were loosened together. There was a general shifting of cramped bodies, accompanied by a gust of exclamations.
“He was a monster!”
“He was a behemoth!”
“Oh! but you’re a conjurer, Herb. How on earth did you give such a fetching call?”
“I could never have believed that those sounds came from a human throat and a birch-bark horn, if I hadn’t been sitting in the boat with you!”
When there was a break in the excited chorus, Herb, without answering the compliments to his calling powers, asked quietly,—
“Didn’t you think we’d lost him, boys, when he stopped short in the middle of his rush, and you heard nothing?”
“We just did,” answered Cyrus. “That was the longes half-hour I ever put in. What made him do it?”