“But the expression of his small eye and mighty jaw, which certainly belied his true character, was bloodthirsty to the last degree; and his white coat was disfigured with a tangle of long scars which looked as if the business of his life were brawls. As I afterwards learned, those scars were the ornament of a hero, no less to be honored than if his great heart had throbbed in a human body.
“It was one night in camp at the head of the Big Chiputneticook that I heard how those scars were achieved. Tent was pitched on a bit of dry interval which fringed the base of a high rock, a well-known landmark to trappers, and distinguished by the name of ‘The Devil’s Pulpit.’ The rock towered over us, naked and perpendicular, for a distance of two hundred feet, then shelved, and rose again some hundreds of feet farther to a beetling cap of mingled rock and forest.
“Our camp was flanked on each side by a thicket of cherry and vines and young water-ash, and the light of our fire filled the space between with the comfort of its cheerful radiance. In the midst of this we lay basking, each waiting for the other to begin a yarn; but no one seemed prepared.
“We had been out ten days in the wilderness; and night after night our occupation had been this one of ‘swapping’ experiences, till I had found myself compelled to fall back on my inventive faculty, and our Indian, Steve, who was communicative beyond the custom of his people, had begun to repeat himself in his stories.
“As for H——, he never spun a yarn save under some strong compulsion, yet we knew more or less vaguely that many a strange experience had fallen to his lot. We had had some stirring adventures together, he and I, since first I had initiated him into the mysteries of woodcraft. But it was rare for him to recall them in conversation, and hence I judged that there was much in his experience of which I had never heard.
“On the present occasion the long silence was becoming almost drowsy. For me the flame from our logs was beginning to change mistily into the glow from a heaped-up grate, and to play over two small curly heads and a long-eared pup on a hearth-rug, when suddenly from far up in the moonlit rocks of the summit came the wail of the northern panther.
“I was startled wide-awake; and the little vision faded instantly into a consciousness of the open heaven, the white lake, and that lonely, haunted summit.
“But it was not altogether the panther that had startled me. It was Dan, who had sprung almost over my head toward the hillside, and now stood trembling with wrath.
“At the command of his master he stalked back and sat down again; but he faced the hillside, and never withdrew his fierce gaze from the spot whence the sound had seemed to come.
“‘Never mind him, old dog,’ said H—— soothingly; ‘you can’t get at him, you know.’