“He seems a great hunter of bears,” Johnny told himself. “No doubt, living as he does in such isolation, he knows more about bears than human beings. But am I to be his cub weeks on end?”
He pictured himself living in the wilderness with this curious wanderer, dressing in skins, hunting with bow and arrow, fishing with crude nets, living the life of a savage.
“No,” he told himself. “It can’t be.”
The hunchback heard. Turning about, he leered at him in a strange fashion. Then they tramped on.
Just as dawn was breaking they came upon a thick growth of fir trees crowning the crest of a hill. At the very center of this they found a cabin.
This cabin was much more perfectly built than the other. The stones for its chimney were cut in squares. The logs had been hewn off on two sides. And beside the fireplace hung two heavy iron skillets and three stew-pans.
“Did he build it, or appropriate it after some trapper or prospector had left it?” the boy asked himself.
Too weary for thought, he went about the business of frying bear steak over the fire kindled by his companion. After eating, he buried himself in a great heap of furs and lost himself in the land of dreams.
CHAPTER XXIII
THREE BEAR SKINS
Early next morning, before Gordon Duncan was astir, and while the girl still slept the sleep of exhaustion, the Indians crept from beneath their caribou skins and journeyed forth in quest of food.