“All right, then!  Let’s have it!” was the reply.  “I’m pretty glad our camp-fare is decent to-night, Joe, for we’ve a visitor here; a hungry bird who has strayed from his own camp, and has wandered through the forest until he looks like a death’s head.  But we’ll soon fix him up; won’t we, Joe?  Give him a mug of hot tea right away.  Hot tea is worth a dozen of any other drink in the woods for a pick-me-up.”

A spark of fun kindled in Dol’s eyes when he heard himself described as “a hungry bird.”  It brightened into an appreciative beam as the reviving tea trickled down his throat.

“Eatin’s wot he wants, I guess,” said Joe, the camp guide and cook, placing some meat and a slab of bread of his own baking on a tin plate for the guest.

Dol began on them greedily; and though the first mouthful or two threatened to sicken him, his squeamishness wore off, and he gained strength with every morsel.

“How do you like Maine venison, my boy?  Like it well enough to have another piece, eh?” asked his host, when he saw that the haggard, gray look was leaving the wanderer’s face, and that the appalled, dazed expression, the result of being lost in the woods, had disappeared from his eyes.

“I think it’s the best meat I ever tasted,” answered Dol heartily.  “It’s so tender, and has a splendid taste.”

“Ha! ha!  It ought to be prime,” chuckled the owner of the camp.  “It was cut from the quarters of a buck which my nephew here, Royal Sinclair,” pointing out the tallest of three lads, “shot four days ago.  He was a regular crackerjack—­that buck!  I mean, he was as fine a deer as ever I saw; weighed over two hundred pounds, had seven prongs to his horns on one side and six on the other.  Royal is going to take the antlers home with him to Philadelphia.  We were mighty glad to get him, too; for we have been camping here for five weeks, and were running short of provisions.  Roy had quite an attack of buck-fever over it, though he didn’t think he was killing the ‘fatted calf’, to entertain a visitor; did you, Roy?”

“I guess not, Uncle!  But I’m pretty glad, all the same,” answered Royal, with a smiling glance at Dol.

Young Farrar found himself in very pleasant quarters; and, now that he was recovering, his laugh rang from one log wall to the other.

“What’s ’buck-fever’?” he questioned, while Joe filled his plate with more venison.

“A sort of disease of which you’ll learn the meaning before you leave these woods,” answered his host merrily.  “It attacks a man when he’s out after a deer, and makes him feel as if one leg stands firm under him, while the other shakes as if it had the palsy.

“Now I guess you’d like to know whose camp you’re in, my boy, and then you can tell your story.  Well, to begin with the most useful member of the party.  That knowing-looking fellow over there, who cooked your supper, is Joe Flint, the best guide that ever pulled a trigger or handled a frying-pan in this region—­barring one.  These three rascals,” here the speaker beamed upon the strapping lads, with whom Dol had been exchanging sympathetic glances of curiosity, “are my nephews, Royal, Will, and Martin Sinclair.  And I—­I—­