"No so ver' much. Funny tree," grunted the Indian.
"Smooth as a fireman's brass pole," added Rod, seeing no significance in Mukoki's words. "Listen!"
He stopped so suddenly that Wabigoon bumped into him from behind.
"Did you hear that?"
"No."
For a few moments the three huddled close together in watchful silence. Mukoki was behind the boys or they would have seen that his rifle was ready to spring to his shoulder and that his black eyes were snapping with something not aroused by curiosity alone. The cabin was not more than twenty paces away. It was old, so old that Rod wondered how it had withstood the heavy storms of the last winter. A growth of saplings had found root in its rotting roof and the logs of which it was built were in the last stage of decay. There was no window, and where the door had once been there had grown a tree a foot in diameter, almost closing the narrow aperture through which the mysterious inhabitants had passed years before. A dozen paces, five paces from this door, and Mukoki's hand reached out and laid itself gently upon Wabi's shoulder. Rod saw the movement and stopped. A strange look had come into the old Indian's face, an expression in which there was incredulity and astonishment, as if he believed and yet doubted what his eyes beheld. Mutely he pointed to the tree growing before the door, and to the reddish, crumbling rot into which the logs had been turned by the passing of generations.
"Red pine," he said at last. "That cabin more'n' twent' t'ous'nd year old!"
There was an awesome ring in his voice. Rod understood, and clutched Wabi's arm. In an instant he thought of the other old cabin, in which they had found the skeletons. They had repaired that cabin and had passed the winter in it, and they knew that it had been built half a century or more before. But this cabin was beyond repair. To Rod it seemed as though centuries of time instead of decades had been at work on its timbers. Following close after Wabi he thrust his head through the door. Deep gloom shut out their vision. But as they looked, steadily inuring their eyes to the darkness within, the walls of the old cabin took form, and they saw that everywhere was vacancy. There was no ancient table, as in the other cabin they had discovered at the head of the first chasm, there were no signs of the life that had once existed, not even the remnants of a chair or a stool. The cabin was bare.
Foot by foot the two boys went around its walls. Mukoki took but a single glance inside and disappeared. Once alone he snapped down the safety of his rifle. Quickly, as if he feared interruption, he hurried around the old cabin, his eyes close to the earth. When Rod and Wabi returned to the door he was at the edge of the fall, crouching low among the rocks like an animal seeking a trail. Wabi pulled his companion back.
"Look!"