Not a ray of sense was yet in the half-breed’s eyes.  An imaginary, vengeance-dealing Herb was before him; but he never turned a glance towards the real, and now forgiving, old chum, who leaned against the wall not ten feet away.  His voice dropped to a guttural rumble, in which Indian sounds mingled with English.

But the flame at Herb’s heart was quenched at the first whimpered word.  His stiffened muscles and lips relaxed.  With a gurgle of sorrow, he crossed the camp-floor, and dropped into a crawling position on the faded spruces.

“Chris!” he cried thickly.  “Chris,—­poor old pard,—­don’t ye know me?  Look, man!  Herb is right here—­Herb Heal, yer old chum.  You’re ’heap sick’ for sure; but we’ll haul you off to a settlement or to our camp, and I’ll bring Doc along in two days.  He’ll”—­

But Cross-eyed Chris became past hearing, his flicker of strength had failed; he keeled over, and lay, with his limp legs curled up, faint and speechless, upon the dead evergreens.

“You ain’t a-going to die!” gasped Herb defiantly.  “I’ll be jiggered if you be, jest as I’ve found you!  Say, boys!  Cyrus!  Neal! rub him a bit, will ye?  We ain’t got no brandy, I’ll build a fire, and warm some coffee.”

It was strange work for the hands of the Bostonian, and stranger yet for those of young Farrar,—­son of an English merchant-prince,—­this straightening and rubbing of a dying half-Indian, a “scum,” as Herb called him, drunkard, and thief.  Yet there was no flash of hesitation on Farrar’s part, as they brought their warm friction to bear upon the chill yellow skin, piebald from dirt and the stains of travel, as if it were the very mission which had brought them to Katahdin.

They had grave thoughts meanwhile that the old mountain was decidedly gloomy in its omens, first a thunder-storm and then a tragedy; for, rub as they might with brotherly hands, they could not pass their own warmth into the body of the half-breed, though he still lived.

But the mountain had not ended its terrors yet.

Its mumbling lips began to speak, with a threatening, low at first like muttered curses, but swelling into a nameless noise—­a rumbling, pounding, creeping, crashing.

“Great Governor’s Ghost! what’s that?” gasped Cyrus, stopping his rubbing.  “Pamolah or some other fiend seems to be bombarding us from the top now.”

“It’s more thunder rolling over us,” said Neal; but as he spoke his tongue turned stiff with fear.

“Sounds as if the whole mountain was tumbling to pieces.  Perhaps it’s the end of the world,” suggested Dol, as a succession of booming shocks from above seemed to shake the camping-ground under his feet.

There was one second of awful indecision.  The boys looked at each other, at the dying man, at the roof above them, in the stiffness of uncertain terror.

Then a figure leaped into their midst, with an armful of dry sticks, which he dashed from him.  It was Herb, with the fuel for a fire.  And, for the first and last time in his history, so far as these friends of his knew it, there was that big fear in his face which is most terrible when it looks out of the eyes of a naturally brave man.