As Red Rodgers followed the girl in the dark over the narrow trail that led away from the dock where they had discovered mysterious footprints in the snow, he found himself climbing what seemed to him an almost perpendicular wall. Here he stumbled over a boulder, there slipped on a stretch of earth that appeared to stand on end, and here found himself clawing madly in air for some form of hand-hold. That the girl knew the trail well enough became evident at once. She reached the crest of the ridge far in advance of him.
“Here! Give me your hand,” she breathed as he came up. “It’s not so steep on this side. Almost not steep at all.”
Red heaved a sigh of relief, then prepared to follow on.
The trail was much longer on this side. It seemed strange, this prowling about in the darkness on an island he knew only by name.
As his eyes became more accustomed to the darkness he made out vague black bulks to the right and to the left. “Trees,” he told himself.
When one of these black bulks let out a low grunt and vanished into the night, he stopped short.
“Moose,” the girl said in a low tone. “All over the island. Like the bears of Yellowstone. That was probably old Uncle Ned.”
“Uncle Ned?”
“I’ll tell you about him some time,” she whispered.
Dense darkness lay before them. The girl plunged into this darkness, the shadow of a narrow stretch of forest.