I ought to have mentioned that a cold lunch had been prepared the night before, and the three trampers had partaken sparingly of it before starting. Now, however, they had a sharpened appetite, and ate ravenously of the doughnuts, hard bread and sandwiches which Solomon brought out of his stores.
This halt occupied about an hour, so that it was nearly nine when they resumed their walk.
Their progress now became very slow. The picks of the miners were no longer heard, and they realized that they were in the veritable Alaskan wilderness. The rush of the little brook was the only sound that broke the silence of the moss-draped and carpeted forest.
They had passed beyond the brow of the mountain immediately overlooking Juneau, and, while the grade was not quite so steep, the evergreens grew more densely, and the stream was so narrow as to barely afford them a pathway. Of course their feet had been soaked during the very first hour of their climb. There was now not a dry stitch on either of the boys, below the waist.
For a few rods, Solomon had been peering here and there; Tom afterward declared he fairly sniffed the air for game, like a hound.
“What is it, Solomon?” called out Tom, picking himself out of a crevice between two wet rocks.
The hunter held up his hand for silence; then stooped and carefully examined a log just in front of him. Calling the boys, he pointed to it with one of his silent chuckles.
Fred adjusted his glasses and eyed the log critically. “It seems just a common, every-day log, don’t it, Tom?” he remarked in a guarded voice to that young man.
It was a fallen hemlock, lying directly across their path. Baranov laid his finger lightly on a small reddish spot, where the bark had been scraped off.
“A b’ar did that,” he whispered. “An not long ago, neither.”