There was an awesome ring in his voice.  Rod understood, and clutched Wabi’s arm.  In an instant he thought of the other old cabin, in which they had found the skeletons.  They had repaired that cabin and had passed the winter in it, and they knew that it had been built half a century or more before.  But this cabin was beyond repair.  To Rod it seemed as though centuries of time instead of decades had been at work on its timbers.  Following close after Wabi he thrust his head through the door.  Deep gloom shut out their vision.  But as they looked, steadily inuring their eyes to the darkness within, the walls of the old cabin took form, and they saw that everywhere was vacancy.  There was no ancient table, as in the other cabin they had discovered at the head of the first chasm, there were no signs of the life that had once existed, not even the remnants of a chair or a stool.  The cabin was bare.

Foot by foot the two boys went around its walls.  Mukoki took but a single glance inside and disappeared.  Once alone he snapped down the safety of his rifle.  Quickly, as if he feared interruption, he hurried around the old cabin, his eyes close to the earth.  When Rod and Wabi returned to the door he was at the edge of the fall, crouching low among the rocks like an animal seeking a trail.  Wabi pulled his companion back.

“Look!”

The old warrior rose, suddenly erect, and turned toward them, but the boys were hidden in the gloom.  Then he hurried to the dead stub beside the chasm wall.  Again he reached far up, rubbing his hand along its surface.

“I’m going to have a look at that tree!” whispered Wabi.  “Something is puzzling Are you coming?”

He hurried across the rock-strewn opening, but Rod hung back.  He could not understand his companions.  For weeks and months they had planned to find this third waterfall.  Visions of a great treasure had been constantly before their eyes, and now that they were here, with the gold perhaps under their very feet, both Mukoki and Wabigoon were more interested in a dead stub than in their search for it!  His own heart was almost bursting with excitement.  The very air which he breathed in the old cabin set his blood leaping with anticipation.  Here those earlier adventurers had lived half a century or more ago.  In it the life-blood of the murdered John Ball might have ebbed away.  In this cabin the men whose skeletons he had found had slept, and planned, and measured their gold.  And the gold!  It was that and not the stub that interested Roderick Drew!  Where was the lost treasure?  Surely the old cabin must hold some clue for them, it would at least tell them more than the limbless white corpse of a tree!

From the door he looked back into the dank gloom, straining his eyes to see, and then glanced across the opening.  Wabi had reached the stub, and both he and Mukoki were on their knees beside it.  Probably they have found the marks of a lynx or a bear, thought Rod.  A dozen paces away something else caught his eyes, a fallen red pine, dry and heavy with pitch, and in less than a minute he had gone to it and was back with a torch.  Breathlessly he touched the tiny flame of a match to the stick.  For a moment the pitch sputtered and hissed, then flared into light, and Rod held the burning wood above his head.