“Boys, where’s yer senses?” he yelled cuttingly.  “Out, for your lives!  Run!  There’s a slide above us on the mountain!”

“Him?” questioned Cyrus’s stiff lips, as he pointed to the breathing wreck on the spruce boughs.  “He’s not dead yet.”

“D’ye think I’d leave him?  Clear out of this camp—­you, or we’ll be buried in less’n two minutes!  To the right!  Off this ridge!  Got yer rifles?  I’m coming!”

The woodsman flung out the words while his brawny arms hoisted the body of his old chum.  His comrades had already disappeared when he turned and sprang for the camp-door with his limp burden, but his moccasined foot kicked against something.

A great hiccough which was almost a sob rose from Herb’s throat.  It was his one valuable possession, his 45-90 Winchester rifle, his second self, which he had rested against the log wall.

“Good-by, Old Blazes!” he grunted.  “You never went back on me, but I can’t lug him and you!  My stars! but that was a narrow squeak.”

For, as he cleared the camping-ground with a blind dash, with head bent and tongue caught between his clenched teeth, with a boom like a Gatling gun, a great block of granite from the summit of Katahdin struck the rock which sheltered the old camp, breaking a big piece off it, and shot on with mighty impetus down the mountain.

An avalanche of loose earth, stones, and bushes, brought down by this battering-ram of the landslide, piled themselves upon the log hut, smashing to kindling-wood its walls, which had stood many a hard storm, burying them out of sight, and flinging wide showers of dust and small missiles.

A scattered rain of clay caught Herb upon the head, and lodged, some of it, on the little pack containing axe and lunch which was strapped upon his shoulders.

He shook.  His grip loosened.  The limp, dragging body in his arms sank until the feet touched the earth.

But with the supreme effort, moral and physical, of his life, the forest guide gathered it tight again.

“I’ll be blowed if I’ll drop him now,” he gasped.  “He ain’t nothing but a bag o’ bones, anyhow.”

Only a strong man in the hour of his best strength could have done it.  With a defiant snort Herb charged through the choking dust-clouds, pelted by flying pebbles, sods, and fragments of sticks.

“This way, boys!” he roared, after five straining, staggering minutes, as he caught a glimpse of his comrades ahead, tearing off to the right, as he had bidden them.  “You may let up now.  We’re safe enough.”

They faced back, and saw him make a few reeling, descending steps, then lay what now seemed to be an out-and-out lifeless man on a bed of moss beneath a dwarfed spruce.

The nerves of the three were in a jumping condition, their brains felt befuddled, and their hearts sinking and melting in the midst of their bones, from the astounding shock and terror of the land-slide.  But, as they beheld the guide deposit his burden, with its helplessly trailing head and limbs, a cheer in unsteady tones rang above the slackening rattle of earth and stones, and the far-away boom of the granite-block as it buried itself in the forest beneath.