CHAPTER IX.
A MOUNTAIN MYSTERY.
Ralph said nothing of his adventure of the night till the next morning. As he had expected, his young chums put it down to a feverish imagination. Even the professor suggested a dose of quinine; but Mountain Jim walked over after the morning meal to where the boy had seen the apparition, which, Ralph was beginning to believe, the figure must have been.
The lad accompanied the mountaineer, who had expected to find some tracks or traces by which Ralph’s adventure might be verified. But the ground was rocky, and the soft bed of the forest beyond held no tracks, so that they were disappointed in their anticipation of finding some clew to the strange appearance of the night.
“You’re certain sure, dead certain sure that you did see something. Didn’t just dream it?” questioned Mountain Jim as they made their way back to camp where the others were busy packing the ponies, even Persimmons being by this time able to cast a “diamond hitch.”
“I’m positive,” declared Ralph firmly; “if I hadn’t been so certain that what I saw was a man, I would have fired. But who could it have been?” he added in a perplexed voice. Jim shook his blond head.
“Great Blue Bells of Scotland, I dunno, boy,” he said, thoughtfully puffing at his pipe. “You ain’t the sort of lad to dream things, I can see that. But it’s got me. If we’d been in the gold country now it might have been a prospector, but nobody goes through here, not even hunters, for right where we are now is a bad place for game.”
So, for the time being, the mystery of the midnight visitor was unsolved and almost forgotten. It was destined to be recalled later in a startling manner, but for the present even Ralph began to believe that he might have been the victim of some sort of an hallucination, caused, possibly, by the fact that he was only half awake when he had beheld the figure on the rock.
As Mountain Jim had said, the country through which they were now traveling was indeed a bad section for hunters. Although the boys made several detours after game, not so much as a rabbit did they see. The day following the night on which Ralph had seen, or thought he had seen, the figure of the watching man, they encountered, for the first time, a tract of country common enough in the Canadian wilds but particularly unpleasant to travel through, namely, a brulee or vast tract of woods through which a forest fire has swept, leaving desolation in its path.
Nothing more depressing can be imagined than these burned forests. Naked, blackened trees, with rags of scorched bark peeling from their bare trunks, tower out of a desert expanse of gray-black ash. Horses or foot travelers passing through, churn up clouds of this ashen dust which chokes the nostrils, burns the eyes and blackens everything with which it comes in contact.