“And what became of the head? Did you sell it?” asked Dol, who was, as usual, the first to break a breathless silence.
There was no reply. Herb feigned not to hear.
“Did you get two hundred dollars for the head?” questioned the impetuous youngster again, in a higher key, his curiosity swelling.
“I didn’t. It was stole.”
The answer was a growl, like the growl of a hurt animal whose sore has been touched. The tone of it was so different from the woodsman’s generally strong, happy-go-lucky manner of speech, that Dol blenched as if he had been struck.
“Who stole it?” he gasped, after a minute, scarcely knowing that he spoke aloud.
Unnoticed in the firelight, Cyrus clapped a strong hand over the boy’s mouth, to stifle further questions.
“Keep still!” he whispered.
But Herb, who was, as usual, perched upon the “deacon’s seat,” leaned forward, with a laugh which was more than half a snarl.
“Who stole it?” he echoed. “Why, the other fellow—my chum; the man whom I carried for a mile on my back, through a snow-heaped forest, the first time I saw him, when I had lugged him out of a heavy drift. He stole it, Kid, and a’most everything I owned with it.”