The initials T. H. on the creature’s back had been reversed when he fell upside down.  And Tom realized with a thrill that what had just happened before his eyes had happened at that log up in the woods.

Llewellyn, the Humpty-dumpty of the animal world, had slid off the log, alighting upside down.

For a moment Tom Slade paused in dismay.

So Teddy Howell and Harry Thorne had nothing to do with this.  This lumbering, waddling creature had come flopping along down out of the silent lower reaches of that frowning mountain, straight to his destination.  He was not the first printer to print something the wrong way around.

Who, then, was T. H.?  Not Master Anthony, Jr., at all events.  But some one afar off, surely.  Abstractedly, Tom Slade gazed off toward that towering mountain whence this clumsy but unerring messenger had come.  It looked very dark up there.  Tom recalled how from those lofty crags the great eagle had swooped down and met his match before the hallowed little home of Orestes.

In a kind of reverie Tom’s thoughts wandered to Orestes.  Orestes would be in bed by now.  Orestes had lived away up near where that turtle had come from.  And the thought of Llewellyn and Orestes turned Tom’s thought to Hervey Willetts.  He had not seen much of Hervey the last day or two....

Tom fixed his gaze upon that old monarch where again the first crimson rays of dying sunlight glinted the pinnacles of the somber pines near its summit.  How solemn, how still, it seemed up there.  The nearer sounds about the camp seemed only to emphasize that brooding silence.  It was like the silence of some vast cathedral—­awful in its majestic solitude.

And this impassive, stolid, hard-shell pilgrim, knowing his business like the bully scout he was, had come stumbling, sliding, rolling and waddling down out of those fastnesses, because there was something right here which he wanted.  And he had brought a clew.  Should the human scout be found wanting where this humble little hero had triumphed?

“I never paid much attention to those stories,” Tom mused; “but if there’s a draft dodger living up there, I’m going to find him.  If there’s a hermit I’m going to see him.  If there’s....”

He paused suddenly in his musing, listening.  It was the distant voice of a scout returning to camp.  He was singing one of those crazy songs that he was famous for.  Tom looked up beyond the supply cabin and saw him coming down, twirling his hat on a stick, hitching up one stocking as often as it went down—­care-free, happy-go-lucky, delightfully heedless.

He looked for all the world like a ragged vagabond.  The evening breeze bore the strain he was singing down to where stolid Tom stood and he smiled, then suddenly became tensely interested as he listened.  Tom often wondered where Hervey got his songs and ballads.  On the present occasion this is what the blithe minstrel was caroling: