For a few moments the pain was intense, almost unendurable.  Poor Ralph groaned aloud and sank down on the ground, biting his lips in trying to keep tears of agony from welling to his eyes.  How could he walk the remaining distance home?  Even with an improvised crutch made from a forked branch of some tree, it would be well-nigh impossible to travel up and down the stony grades that stretched between the place where he had met with this unfortunate accident and the farmhouse.

“Oh, if Keno had only not broken away!”

The futile wish was maddening in his present plight.  He showered sharp epithets upon the absent pony, until he remembered the probability that Keno’s return without him would be the means of sending some one to the rescue.  This was some consolation, though it was but cold comfort in view of the fact that, had Keno not bolted, this mishap would not have occurred.

However, there was no help for it now.  Meanwhile, the badly sprained ankle was throbbing painfully, and Ralph’s next thought was to thrust it, without taking off his shoe, into the cold running water in order to check the swelling.  He held his foot there, shivering with relief, then he stretched himself out on the bank of the stream, in the warm sunlight.  Whereupon, with anxious mind and weary body soothed by the loud splash of the waterfall, with the pain in his ankle considerably relieved, and with a soft, grassy nook beside a rock offering repose, it was not very strange that, after closing his eyes drowsily, Ralph sank into a troubled slumber.

When he awoke, the sun was only a little way above the tops of the highest trees, and long golden shafts of light were slanting down through the branches, making an intricate tracery of shadows on the ground.  The air was beginning to have a decided chill, for the wind had shifted to the west and was blowing the spray of the waterfall into Ralph’s face.

Strange that no one had come, in search of him!  Of course his mother could not have hitched Keno to the old buggy and driven here, but she might have telephoned to Tom Walsh and asked him to find out what had become of the missing hunter.  He made another bold attempt to walk, with the aid of a stout pine branch; but he could not bear to put any weight on that cursed ankle.

“Well, I guess I’m bound to spend the night here,” he told himself grimly, after several futile starts.  “I hope mother’ll not worry; she may not have noticed Keno, after all, if he went straight to the barn.  I remember I left the door open.  And now what’s the first thing to be done?  Oh, I know:  make a fire—–­and two smoke fires for a distress signal.”

So he set about doing this, hobbling with difficulty over the uneven ground.  The signal fires he placed about fifty feet apart, so that the wind should not confuse them; his camp fire he built between three big rocks that formed a natural oven, over which he laid a hastily constructed grill made of green alder withes.  On this grill he intended to broil whatever game he could bring down with his rifle, for supper; and, as luck would have it, he did not have to wait long before he “bagged” a large gray squirrel, which he dexterously skinned and prepared for cooking.