The latter allowed him to stagger backward until he leaned against the body of the tree under which the novel man-trap had been arranged.  He was breathing hard, but seemed to be recovering from his panic; at least his cries had utterly ceased, which was one good thing.

So Max flashed the light into his face, while Obed leaned forward and eagerly stared hard at him.  They saw rough lineaments, seamed and hardened by exposure to the elements; but of course the face was that of an utter stranger to Max.  As for Obed, he was heard to give a sigh of disappointment, as though he too had failed to recognize any one whom he had reason to know.

The man by now seemed to have recovered in part.  He was looking at the boys in a peculiar way; Max could not decide on the spur of the moment whether it was wonder or shrewdness that he saw there as the predominant trait of the man’s features.  But at any rate, since he had recovered his breath to some extent, he should be capable of speaking, and explaining how it came about he found himself in such a predicament.

“Well, who are you, anyway?” demanded Max, throwing as much sternness into his voice as he could.  “Give an account of yourself, and tell us why you were creeping about here like a thief in the night?”

“What! me a thief?” shrilled the man, as though, again excited by the very idea of such a base accusation; “I never had that name, young feller.  Them that knows Jake Storms say he’s an honest man, if ever there was one.  I’m only a guide, and a trapper, but nobody ever yet caught me thievin’ or poachin’, I’d have yuh know.”

“Where’s your home, Jake Storms?” continued Max.

“If yuh mean whar do I hang out, it’s this way,” explained the other.  “Last summer I was up at Paul Smith’s place, workin’ for the hotel.  I heard some tall stories about the country around old Mount Tom, how full of fur animals it was, and so I made up my mind to spend the winter hereabouts.  I built me a cabin away up on the other side of the mountain, and was agoin’ to start settin’ my traps when I got word that a gentleman wanted me to come down to Lathrop and git him.  Yuh see, his doctor advised that he spend the winter in the mountains, and he thought of me, beca’se we’d been in the woods a heap of times in past years.  So I was headin’ for Lathrop by a trail I’d run across that took around the mountain, and meanin’ to keep on as long as I could durin’ the night, when all at once something flew up and hit me ker-slap!  Say, I thought it was an earthquake, sure I did.  And then I found myself hangin’ upside down, with all the blood runnin’ into my head.  What’s it mean, young fellers; I give yuh my word I don’t get the hang o’ it at all.”

Max was not surprised to hear the man speak in this fashion.  He had already made up his mind, after that one good look at the other’s face, the prisoner of the barrel trap was a pretty “slick article,” as Steve would have expressed it.  And caught in the act, as he had been, it was to be expected that the fellow would have some kind of reasonable story to spin, in order to explain his presence there.