That looked a bit singular, Bandy-legs thought.  His suspicions returned again, though with diminished force; for somehow he could not look into that frank and even merry face of the woods boy and actually believe he was “off-color” in any way.

“But what do you do with yourself all alone, I’d like to know?” burst out impetuous Steve.  “Are you making a living playing at guide for parties of tourists, or fishermen and hunters?  And, say, you don’t mean to tell me you stay all alone up in this wilderness right through the winter?”

Obed Grimes nodded his head cheerfully.

“I ain’t got any choice in the matter, yuh see,” he told them, mysteriously; “just got to stay.  Why, it would bust the hull business to smash if I ’lowed myself to skip out, even for a week or two.  I’m tied down to it, that’s right.”

Bandy-legs exchanged a significant look Toby Jucklin.  He scratched his head with the air of one who found himself up against a hard, knotty problem.  Apparently, if the stranger in camp was trying to mystify them, he had already succeeded in tangling up the wits of Bandy-legs completely.

Max continued to sit there and take it all in.  There was no need of his saying anything so long as the other fellows had embarked on the task of drawing Obed out and learning just what he was doing to keep him marooned up there summer and winter, like a regular old recluse, or woodchuck.

“But there must be heaps and heaps of snow here winters,” suggested Steve; “and I’d think you’d find it pretty hard getting about.”

“Oh! not so bad when you have snow-shoes” Obed told him, with a shrug of his shoulders, and another attack on the contents of his tin panninkin.

“’Course not,” Steve hastened to say, as though he had guessed that this would be the answer.  “But when the law is on the deer and partridges it must be hard to keep to a regular diet of trout.  I c’n stand them for a while; but in the end I’d get sick of the smell of ’em cooking.”

“Oh!  I have plenty of good grub along,” chuckled Obed.  “I was on my way home at the time I glimpsed your fire; and bein’ full o’ wonder concernin’ who could be around these diggings right now I crept up to spy on ye.  But say, soon’s I glimpsed your crowd, and saw that you was only a bunch o’ boys, why I felt easier, ’cause I knew then you couldn’t mean to bother me any.”

Now that sounded queer again, Bandy-legs thought.  Why should any one take the trouble to “bother” Obed Grimes, unless, indeed, he had been doing something that he hadn’t ought to, and hence expected to be visited sooner or later by emissaries of the law, possibly in the shape of angry game wardens?

All sorts of strange thoughts flashed through that active brain of the boy with the bowed legs.  He wondered whether Obed could be a desperate young criminal.  Had his family, those excellent Grimes of whom he had spoken in such proud accents, cast him out as altogether beyond hope?  Bandy-legs could hardly think this when he looked again into that face, and caught the gleam of those merry orbs.  No, Obed might be a peculiar sort of fellow, but really there did not seem to be much of guile in his make-up; if it turned out to be so, then he, Bandy-legs, was ready to call himself a mighty poor reader of character.