Hal's "No!" was shouted at the top of his lungs.
"'Tis a vote," declared Walter. "Mr. Harrison will now attend to his duties and carry out the action of this assembly."
After the dishes were out of the way Pat built a huge fire with three great backlogs one above another and slanting back to keep them from rolling down. They were held in place by braces at the back. In front of these smaller logs were piled, the backlogs reflecting the heat forward into the lean-to. Then the blankets were spread on the rough beds, and with all their clothing on, including moccasins, four weary young woodsmen turned in for the night.
Pat was asleep almost as soon as he touched the bed, and Hal and Upton were not far behind him. But to Sparrer, tired as he was, the novelty of his surroundings was too great for immediate sleep, and for a long time he lay staring out at the flickering flames and above them at the brilliant stars, his active imagination keyed to a high pitch. It was like fairy-land to him. Nothing seemed real. He had read and heard of these things, but that he, Eddie Muldoon, could actually be experiencing them, sleeping in a real hunter's camp in the dead of winter, tramping on snow-shoes through great lonely forests, eating such meals as he had never known before in all his short life—meals cooked over open fires in the great wonderful out-of-doors, couldn't be. And yet here he was.
The fire died down until only a deep glow, a warm ruddy glow which grew less and less, lighted the rough interior, and before it had quite vanished Eddie had slipped from the real which seemed unreal to the unreal which so often seems real in the realm of dreams.
Three times during the night Pat crawled out of his blankets to put wood on the fire, but the other sleepers knew nothing of it. They slept the deep heavy sleep of healthy, tired boys and it mattered not to them that the temperature dropped until the very trees cracked and split with the cold. They were as warm and comfortable as if in their own beds at home. Overhead the stars shone down on a great white world wherein the fire made but a flickering point of yellow light, and wherein was no sound save the heavy breathing of the sleepers, the sputter of hot coals snapping off into the snow, the occasional crack of a frost-riven tree, and the soft stamp of a snow-shoe rabbit gazing wonder-eyed at the dying embers.
CHAPTER VIII
ALEC HINTS AT DARK THINGS
Hal was willing to swear that he had not been asleep more than ten minutes when he was awakened by the beating of a pan with a stick and Pat's roar of "Breakfast! All hands out for breakfast!" He rolled over sleepily so as to look out. Pat was laughing at him. Beyond the firelight and from the tiny strip of sky above the dark tree tops he could see a few pale stars blinking at him weakly.