“So you’re English, are you!  Ha!  Ha!  Ho!  Ho!” exclaimed the doctor, looking at the young Farrars.  “Well, I suppose we’ll have to put our best foot foremost to give you a good time in American woods.”

“I think that’s what we’re having, sir—­such a jolly good time that we’ll never forget it,” answered Neal courteously.

“Yes, it’s jolly enough now; but I tell you I didn’t find it so to-day,” grumbled Dol, while his eyes gleamed like polished steel with the light of present fun.  “But as long as I live I’ll remember the sound of your horn, Doctor, when I was dead-beat.”

“Is that so?  Well, I guess I’ll have to make you a present of that horn, boy, when we part company, and you go back to civilization, and of the piece of birch-bark, too, which led you to our camp.  ’Twas Joe who fixed that to the pine near the swamp; for my lads had a habit of following the trail to the alders, looking for moose or deer signs.  He scrawled his sentence on it with the end of a cartridge.  I guess it would be a sort of curiosity in England.”

Dol whooped his delight.

“I’ll put it under a glass shade!  I’ll”—­

While he was casting about in his mind for some way of immortalizing that bit of white bark, Doc’s genial bluster was heard again,—­

“Come! come! you fellows!  No more skylarking in this camp to-night!  It’s high time for all campers to be snoring.  Turn in!  Turn in!”

But nobody was in a hurry to obey the summons to bed.  While hands and feet were being stretched out to the sizzling birch logs for a final toast, Royal Sinclair, who had a trick of speaking very quickly, with a slight click in his utterance, as if his tongue struck his teeth, began to pour some communications into Neal’s ear in rapid dashes of talk,—­

“This is just about the jolliest night we ever had in the forest, and we’ve had a staving time all through.  We live in Philadelphia, and Uncle Phil—­we call him ‘Doc’ like everybody else—­brought us out here for our summer vacation.  This old log camp was built several years ago by a hunting-party, of whom he was one.  The walls were getting mouldy; but he cleaned up the largest of the huts, with Joe’s help, and made it our headquarters.  He never needs a guide himself; not a bit of it!  He can find his way anywhere through the woods with his compass.  But he is a good deal away, so he engaged Joe to go out with us.

“He often starts off at a moment’s notice, and travels dozens of miles on foot, or in a birch canoe, if he hears of a bad accident far away in the forest.  Sometimes a lumberman or trapper cuts his foot in two, or nearly chops off his leg with his axe; and these poor fellows would probably die while their comrades were lugging them through the woods on a litter, trying to reach a settlement, if it weren’t for our Doc.

“Once in a while, when he comes to visit us in Philadelphia, a few people call him a crank, because he lives out here and dresses like a settler; but I call him a regular brick.”