They started on again, but had gone a short distance when Jack, who was leading, stopped suddenly and, pointing ahead, said,
“I say, Bob, look at that spruce will you.”
Bob looked and saw, a few feet ahead of them, a queer looking spruce. It stood in the center of a small clearing, perhaps twenty feet across. The middle branches had been trimmed away in a broad ring, leaving the tufted top and the bushy bottom, with only the bare trunk in between.
“What, in the world, do you make of that?” Jack asked.
For a moment Bob did not reply. He was deep in thought. Then, as Jack was about to ask him again, he said:
“Unless I’m very much mistaken that’s a lop stick.”
“Come again, please,” Jack laughed.
“I said it is a lop stick.”
“Well, it’s lopped all right, all right,” Jack declared. “But how did it get that way?”
“Some Indian trimmed it that way,” Bob explained. “You see,” he went on, “it’s a kind of a talisman or mascot. I remember reading, not long ago, that a certain tribe of Indians do that to trees. You see an Indian trims a certain tree that way and then he believes that, in some way, his fate is linked with it. That’s about all I know about it.”