The cock was awakened by a bright light in his eyes. A fiery glow, beyond the reddest of sunrises, was flooding the cabin. Long tongues of flame were licking about the doorway. He crowed valiantly, to greet this splendid, blazing dawn. He crowed again and yet again, because he was anxious and disturbed. As a sunrise, this one did not act at all according to precedent.
The piercing notes aroused the man, who was sleeping heavily. In one instant he was out of his bunk and grabbing up his blanket and his pack. In the next he had plunged out through the flaming doorway, and thrown down his armful at a safe distance, cursing acidly at such a disturbance to the most comfortable rest he had enjoyed for a week.
From within the doomed cabin came once more the crow of the cock, shrilling dauntlessly above the crackle and venomous hiss of the flames.
"Gee whizz!" muttered the woodsman, or, rather, that may be taken as the polite equivalent of his untrammelled backwoods expletive. "That there red rooster's game. Ye can't leave a pardner like that to roast!"
With one arm shielding his face, he dashed in again, grabbed the cock by the legs, and darted forth once more into the sweet, chill air, none the worse except for frizzled eyelashes and an unceremonious trimming of hair and beard. The cock, highly insulted, was flapping and pecking savagely, but the man soon reduced him to impotence, if not submission, holding him under one elbow while he tied his armed heels together, and then swaddling him securely in his coat.
"There," said he, "I guess we'll travel together from this out, pardner. Ye've sure saved my life; an' to think I had the notion, for a minnit, o' makin' a meal offen ye! I'll give ye a good home, anyways, an' I guess ye'll lick the socks offen every other rooster in the whole blame Settlement!"
The Ledge on Bald Face
That one stark naked side of the mountain which gave it its name of Old Bald Face fronted full south. Scorched by sun and scourged by storm throughout the centuries, it was bleached to an ashen pallor that gleamed startlingly across the leagues of sombre, green-purple wilderness outspread below. From the base of the tremendous bald steep stretched off the interminable leagues of cedar swamp, only to be traversed in dry weather or in frost. All the region behind the mountain face was an impenetrable jumble of gorges, pinnacles, and chasms, with black woods clinging in crevice and ravine and struggling up desperately towards the light.