"The third day dawned cold and clear, and daylight found the outfit on the move."
Drawn by Frank E. Schoonover
"It git dark queek, now. We git um down all right. Turn um roun' an' mak de pole lak de tail rope on de toboggan—we hol' um back easy." The early darkness was blurring distant outlines and the descent at that point meant the saving of an hour, so Connie agreed and for the first twenty yards all went well. Then suddenly the human toboggan struck the ice of a hillside spring and shot forward. The pole slipped from the snowy mittens of the two and, enveloped in a cloud of flying snow, the man in the frozen moose hide went shooting down the slope! Connie and 'Merican Joe barely saved themselves from following him, and, squatting low on their webs they watched in a fascination of horror as the flying body struck a tree trunk, shot sidewise, ploughed through the snow, struck a rock, bounded high into the air, struck another rock and, gaining momentum with every foot, shot diagonally downward—rolling, whirling, sliding—straight for the brink of a rock ledge with a sheer drop of twenty-five or thirty feet. Over the edge it shot and landed with a loud thud among the broken rock fragments of the valley floor.
"We ought to have gone back!" shuddered the boy. "He's dead by this time."
'Merican Joe shrugged. "Anyhow, dat com' queek. Dat better as if he lay back onder de tree an' froze an' starve, an' git choke to deat' w'en his air hole git froze shut. He got good strong coffin anyhow."
Relieved of their burden it was but the work of a few moments to gain the floor of the valley and hasten to the form wedged tightly between two upstanding boulders, where they were greeted by the voice of the man raised in whining complaint.
"Are you hurt?" eagerly asked Connie, kneeling at the man's side and looking at him closely.
"Naw, I ain't hurt but can't you pick out no smoother trail? I'm all jiggled up!" In his relief at finding the man unharmed, Connie laughingly promised a smoother trail, and as he and the Indian pried him from between the rocks with a young tree, the boy noted that the frozen moose hide had scarcely been dented by its contact with the trees and rocks.