The exclamations were loud and snappy, and awoke the sleeping campers like the banging of rifle-shots.  With jumping pulses they sprang up, feeling a wave of cold air sweep their faces; for the cabin-door, which they had closed ere lying down, was now ajar.

The camp was almost in darkness.  Only one dull, red ray stole out from the fire, on which fresh logs had been piled.  But while the young Farrars rubbed their sleep-dimmed eyes, and slowly realized that the woodsman whom they had been expecting had at last arrived, a strangely brilliant illumination lit up the log walls.

This sudden and bewildering light showed them the figure of a hunter in mud-spattered gray trousers, with coarse woollen stockings of lighter hue drawn over them above his buckskin moccasins.  His battered felt hat was pushed back from his forehead, a guide’s leathern wallet was slung round him, and the rough, clinging jersey he wore, being stretched so tightly over his swelling muscles that its yarn could not hold together, had a rent on one shoulder.

His slate-gray eyes with jetty pupils, which were miniatures of Millinokett Lake at this hour, gazed at the awakened trio in the bunk, with a gleam of light shooting athwart them, like a moonbeam crossing the face of the lake.

The hunter held in his hand a big roll of the inflammable paper-like bark of the white birch-tree, which he had brought in with him to kindle his fire, expecting that it had gone out during his absence.  Seeing a glow still on the hearth, and feeling instantly that the cabin was tenanted, he had applied a match to his bark, causing the vivid flare which revealed him to the eyes of those who had longed for his presence.

“Herb Heal, man, is it you?” shouted Cyrus, his voice like a midnight joy-chime, as he sprang from the fir-boughs and gripped the woodsman’s arm.  “I’m delighted to see you, though I was ready to swear you wouldn’t disappoint us!  I didn’t fasten the cabin-door, for I thought you might possibly get back to camp during the night.”

“Cyrus, old fellow, how goes it?” was Herb’s greeting.  “I had a’most given up looking for you.  But I’m powerful glad you’ve got here at last.”

The hunter’s voice had still the quick snap and force which made it startling as a rifleshot when he entered the cabin.

“These are my friends, Neal and Adolphus Farrar,” said Cyrus, introducing the blanketed youths, who had now risen to their feet.  “Boys, this is Herb Heal, our new guide, christened Herbert Healy—­isn’t that so, Herb?”

“I reckon it is;” answered the young hunter, laughing.  “But no woodsman could spring a sugary, city-sounding name like that on me.  I’ve been Herb Heal from the day I could handle a rifle.”

He nodded pleasantly as he spoke to the strange lads, and began to chat with them in prompt familiarity, looking straight and strong as a young pine-tree in the halo of his birch torch.  Garst, whose inches his juniors had hitherto coveted, was but a stripling beside Herb Heal.