hen I need 'em to eat," said Jarvis, "an' we
do need this one. We'll broil strips of him over the coals in the
mornin'. Don't your mouth water, Harry?"

"It does."

The strips proved the next day to be all that Jarvis had promised,
and they continued their journey with renewed elasticity, fair weather
keeping them company. Deeper and deeper they went into the mountains.
The region had all the aspects of a complete wilderness. Now and then
they saw smoke, which Jarvis said was rising from the chimneys of log
cabins, and once or twice they saw cabins themselves in sheltered nooks,
but nobody hailed them. The news of the war had spread here, of course,
but Harry surmised that it had made the mountaineers cautious,
suppressing their natural curiosity. He did not object at all to their
reticence, as it made traveling easier for him.

They were now rowing along a southerly fork of the Kentucky. Another
deer had been killed, falling this time to the rifle of Jarvis, and one
night they shot two wild turkeys. Jarvis and his nephew would arrive
home full handed in every respect, and his great tenor boomed out
joyously over the stream, speeding away in echoes among the lofty peaks
and ridges that had now turned from hills into real mountains. They
towered far above the stream, and everywhere there were masses of the
deepest and densest green. The primeval forest clothed the whole earth,
and the war to which Harry was going seemed a faint and far thing.

Traveling now became slow, because they always had a strong current to
fight. Harry, at times when the country was not too rough, left the
boat and walked along the bank. He could go thus for miles without
feeling any weariness. Naturally very strong, he did not realize how
much his work at the oar was increasing his power. The thin vital air
of the mountains flowed through his lungs, and when Jarvis sang, as he
did so often, he felt that he could lift up his feet and march as if to
the beat of a drum.

They left the fork of the Kentucky at last and rowed up one of the deep
and narrow mountain creeks. Peaks towered all about them, a half mile
over their heads, covered from base to crest with unbroken forest.
Sometimes the creek flowed between cliffs, and again it opened out into
narrow valleys. In a two days' journey up its course they passed only
two cabins.

"In ordinary water we'd have stopped thar," said Jarvis at the second
cabin. "I know the man who li