isappeared.

Bennington ran to the log. Behind it lay the little animal. The long
steel-jacketed bullet had just grazed the base of its brain. He picked
it up gently in the palm of his hand and contemplated it.

It was such a diminutive beast, not as large as a good-sized rat, quite
smaller than our own fence-corner chipmunks of the East. It's little
sides were daintily striped, its little whiskers were as perfect as
those of the great squirrels in the timber bottom. In its pouches were
the roots of pine cones. Bennington was not a sentimentalist, but the
incident, against the background of the light-hearted day, seemed to
him just a little pathetic. Something of the feeling showed in his
eyes.

The girl, who had drawn near, looked from him to the dead chipmunk, and
back again. Then she burst suddenly into tears.

"Oh, cruel, cruel!" she sobbed. "What did I do it for? What did you
_let_ me do it for?"

Her distress was so keen that the young man hastened to relieve it.

"There," he reassured her lightly, "don't do that! Why, you are a great
hunter. You got your game. And it was a splendid shot. We'll have him
skinned when we get back home, and we'll cure the skin, and you can
make something out of it--a spectacle case," he suggested at random. "I
know how you feel," he went on, to give her time to recover, "but all
hunters feel that way occasionally. See, I'll put him just here until
we get ready to go home, where nothing can get him."

He deposited the squirrel in the cleft of a rock, quite out of sight,
and stood back as though pleased. "There, that's fine!" he concluded.

With one of those instantaneous transitions, which seemed so natural to
her, and yet which appeared to reach not at all to her real nature, she
had changed from an aspect of passionate grief to one of solemn
inquiry. Bennington found her looking at him with the soul brimming to
the very surface of her great eyes.

"I think you may come up on my rock," she said simply after a moment.

They skirted the base of the dike together until they had reached the
westernmost side. There Bennington was shown the means of ascent, which
he had overlooked before because of his too close examination of the
cliff itself. At a distance of about twenty feet from the dike grew a
large pine tree, the lowest branch of which extended directly over the
little plateau and about a foot above it. Next to the large pine stood
two smaller saplings side by side and a