Not to take a certain hazard for the sake of better speed, we shunned the road, and for the first hour or so were not greatly hindered by keeping to the forest paths.  In vast areas this virgin wood was free of undergrowth, open and park-like as a well-kept grove.  Fireside tradition on the border tells how the Indians kept the forest clear by yearly burnings of the smaller growth; this for the better hunting of the deer.  I vouch, not for the truth of this accounting for the fact, but for the fact itself.  For endless miles between the watercourses these park-like stretches covered hill and dale; a vast mysterious temple of God’s own building, its naves and choirs and transepts columned by the countless trees, with all their leafy crowns to interlace and form the groined arches overhead.

Through these pillared aisles we tramped abreast, shunning the road, as I have said, yet holding it parallel with our course where its direction served.  In the open vistas we had frequent glimpses of it, winding, at feud with all the points of the compass, among the trees.  But farther on we came into the lower land of a creek bottom, and here a thickset undergrowth robbed us of any view and made the march a toilsome struggle with the bushes.

It was in the densest of this underwood, when we could hear the purring of the stream ahead, that Jennifer stopped suddenly and began to sniff the air.

“Smoke,” he said, briefly, in answer to my query.  “A camp-fire, with meat abroil.  Never tell me you can’t smell it.”

I said I could not—­did not, at all events.

“Then you are not as sharp set for breakfast as I am.  Call up your woodcraft and we’ll stalk it.”  And, suiting the action to the word, he dropped noiselessly on hands and knees to inch his way cautiously out of the thicket.

I followed at his heels, marveling at his skill in threading the maze with never a snapped twig to betray him.  For though I have called him a youthling, he came of great, square-shouldered English stock, and was well upon fourteen stone for weight.  Yet upon occasion, as now, he could be as lithe and cat-like as an Indian, stealthy in approach and tiger-strong to spring.

In due time our creeping progress brought us out of the thicket on the brink of the higher creek bank.  Just here the stream ran in a shallow ravine with shelving banks of clay, and on its hither margin was a bit of grassy intervale big enough for a horse to roll upon.  Though it was sadly out of season, the carcass of a deer, fresh killed, hung upon a branch of the nearest tree, with a rifle leaning against the trunk as if to guard it.  In the middle of the bit of sward a tiny camp-fire burned; and at the fire, squatting with their backs to us and each toasting a cut of the deer’s meat on a forked stick, were two men.