At the foot of that crag Dol stood still, while a great shiver crept
from his neck up the back of his head, stirring his hair. He peered in
every direction; but there was no sign of a camp, nothing to show that
any human foot before his had disturbed the solitude of this
mountain-side, and no further marks on the ground, save one impression
on a bed of earth at his feet where some animal had lately lain.
The disappointment was stupefying.
At last a fog of terror settled down upon him,—a fog which blotted out
every sight and sound, blotted out even his own thoughts, all except
one, which, like a danger-signal in a mist, kept booming through his
brain: “Lost! Lost!”
By and by he was sitting on the piled-up stones and dirt of the slide;
but he had no remembrance of getting to this resting-place, for he was
still befogged.
Something snorted close to his right ear,—loud snort, which banished
stupor, and set his pulses jumping. It was a deer, a beautiful doe in a
coat of reddish-drab, matching the autumnal tints of the forest,
wherever maples, birches, and cedars mingled with the evergreens. She
had bounded upon him suddenly from behind a dead spruce and a mound of
earth.
It was long since the game on this part of the mountain had been
disturbed. Madam Doe had in all probability never seen a man before,
therefore her behavior was not peculiar. A shock of surprise thrilled
through her graceful body as she vented that snort, when she caught
sight of the new-fangled gray animal who had intruded upon her world,
and who sat spell-bound, gazing at her with hopeless eyes, in which
gradually a light broke.
But she did not fear him,—this creature in gray. She stood stock-still,
and stared at him, so near that he could see her wink her
starry eyes, with the white rings round them. She stamped one hoof,
kicked an insect from her ear with another, snorted again, wheeled
around, and at last broke away for the thick shelter of the trees,
lightly and swiftly as a breeze which skims from one thicket to
another.
Seeing his mother go for the woods, her spotted fawn, which had been
frolicking among the branches of the fallen spruce-tree, skipped from
it, passed Dol with a bound which carried him a few feet, and
disappeared like a whiff too.
Here was a rouser, indeed, which no boy, unless he was in a far-gone
state of suffering, could withstand. Dol Farrar forgot his terrible
predicament. The fog had cleared away from his senses, leaving him free
to think and act once more.
“Well, I never!” he ejaculated, springing to his feet in amazement.
“Wasn’t she a beauty? And wasn’t she a snorter? I didn’t think a deer
could make such a row as that. And to stand still and stare at me! I
wonder whether she took me for some new-fashioned sort of animal or a
gray old stump.”
It was a few minutes before he again thought of his plight, and then he
was not
overcome. He stood perfectly still, trying to review the position
coolly, and to get a tight grip of his feelings, so that terror might
not again master him.
“I’m in a worse scrape than I ever dreamt of,” he muttered, puckering
his forehead to do some tall thinking. “And I must do something to get
out of it. But what? That’s the question.
“I wonder if I loaded this ‘ole fuzzee,’”—the lad was making a valiant
effort to cheer himself by being jocular,—“and blazed away with it for
a while like mad, whether there is any human being around who would
hear me. Some fellow might be hunting or trapping in this part of the
forest, or farther up the mountain. But what a blockhead I am! Why on
earth didn’t I do that before I started on this wretched trail?”
But alas! as this was Dol Farrar’s first adventure in American woods,
it had not occurred to him to do the right thing at the right time. Had
he fired a round of signal shots when first he lost the line of spotted
trees, he would probably have been heard at his camp, and would have
been spared the worst scare he ever had in his life. The negligence was
scarcely his fault, however; for Cyrus Garst, who had never before
undertaken the responsibility of entertaining a pair of inexperienced
boys in woodland quarters, had not, at this early stage of the trip,
arranged with his comrades to fire a certain number of shots to signify
“Help wanted!” if one of them should stray, or otherwise get into
trouble. The idea now cropped up in Dol’s perplexed mind, through a
confused recollection of tales about forest misadventures which Uncle
Eb had told him by the cheery camp-fire.
So he loaded the old shot-gun. It belched forth fire and smoke into
space. And the thunder of his shot went rolling off in a reverberating
din among the mountain echoes, until a hundred tongues repeated his
appeal for help. Again he loaded rapidly and fired. And yet again, with
nervous, eager fingers. So on, till he had let off half a dozen shots
in quick succession.
Then he waited, listening as if every pulse in his body had suddenly
become an ear.
But when the last growling echo had died away, not a sound broke the
almost absolute silence on the mountain-side. Evidently not a human
soul was near enough to hear or understand his signals of distress.
In these bitter minutes some sensations ran through Dol Farrar which he
had never known before; and, as he afterwards expressed it, “they were
enough to cover any fellow with goose-flesh.”
He felt that he had reached the dreariest point of the unknown, and was
a lonely, drifting atom in this immense solitude of forest and rock.
Never in his life before or afterwards did he come so near to Point
Despair as when he stumbled down the mountain, spurning that
treacherous trail, and going wherever his jaded feet found travelling
tolerably easy. He had picked up the shot-gun; but the black ducks, the
primary cause of his misadventure, he clean forgot, leaving them lying
amid the chaos at the foot of the crag, to have their bones picked by
some lucky raccoon or fox.
Wandering along in a zigzag way, he by and by reached the base of the
mountain at a point where there was a break in the forest. A patch of
dreary-looking swamp was before him, covered with clumps of
alder-bushes—a true Slough of Despond.
Dol Farrar knew none of the miseries of plunging through an
alder-swamp, but he luckily recalled in time a warning from Cyrus that
a slight wetting would render his moccasins useless. While he halted
undecidedly on its brink, he pulled out his watch; one glance at this,
and another at the sky, which now lay open like a scroll above him,
gave him a sickening shock. He had started from camp at noon; now it
was after five o’clock. Little more than another hour, and not
twilight, but the blackness of a total eclipse, would reign in the
forest.
The blood rushed to his head, and his mouth grew feverish at the
thought. As he licked his cracking lips, he caught a faint, tinkling,
rumbling sound of falling water somewhere to the right. Of a sudden his
sufferings of mind and body were merged into one burning desire to
drink, and he turned eagerly in that direction.
At the edge of the woods he found a little fairy, foamy waterfall,
which had tumbled down from the mountain to be lost in the dismal
swamp. But Dol felt that it had accomplished its mission when he
unfastened the tin drinking-mug which hung from his belt, and
drank—drank—drank! He straightened himself again, feeling that some of
the bubbling life of the mountain torrent had passed into him. His eyes
lit on a towering pine-tree just beyond it. And then—
Well! if that sky-piercing pine had suddenly changed at a jump into a
gray post, bearing the inscription, “One mile to Boston,” Dol Farrar
could not have been more astonished and relieved than when he saw for
the first time a rude forest guide-post.
To the dark, knotted trunk was fastened a piece of light, delicate
bark, stripped from a white-birch tree. On this was scrawled in big
letters, by some instrument evidently not intended for penmanship:—
“FOLLOW THE BLAZED TRAIL AND YOU ARE SAFE.”
“Another blazed trail! Hurrah!” shouted Dol. “Won’t I follow it? I
never will follow any other again if I live to be a hundred, and come
to these woods every year till I die!”
The height of his relief could only be measured by the depth of his
past misery, which would truly have been enough to set a weaker boy
crazy. With watering eyes and panting breaths that came near to being
sobs of gladness, he started upon the new trail. It led him off into
the forest surrounding the swamp.
The pine that had been chosen for guide-post was the first in the line
of spotted trees. The others followed it closely, with intervals of
eight or ten yards between them; and as the notches in their trunks
were freshly cut, Dol followed the track without any difficulty for
twenty minutes. He had a suspicion that he was nearing the end of it;
though he was still in forest gloom, with light coming in meagre,
ever-lessening streaks through the pine-tufts above. Then he started
more violently than when the deer snorted near his ear.
Suddenly and shrilly the blast of a horn rang through the darkening
woodland aisles, followed, after a pause of a minute or two, by a
second and louder blast.
Then a well-pitched, far-reaching voice sang out:—“Come to supper,
boys! Come to supper!”
“Good gracious!” said Dol, conscious on the instant that he was as
hollow as a drum. “There are enough surprises in these forests to raise
the hair on a fellow’s head half a dozen times a day!”
A matter of forty yards more, and a burst of light swam before his
eyes. He had reached the end of the blazed trail.
[Illustration]