sorrow with a spoon, eh?"

"It's a regular cave of despair." The lonely trill of the feathered
hermit was in Jessie's answering note. "That sad voice of water, a
cascade--a stream--far in, which nobody ever saw!"

"I'd give worlds to see it!" said Pemrose.

"So would I!" Stud's voice was pitched high. "If it weren't for the
Scoutmaster.... Tradition says that whoever drinks of that hidden water
will have luck."

"Well! I'd let somebody else have the piping times if I were you,
Buddy--if they depend on a draught from that mysterious spring."

Now, it was the nickum who answered; the same scintillating tones they
were--how bully they sounded then--which had quoted Shakespeare on
"Something rotten in the State of Denmark", amid other depressing
waters, half hidden, half liberated by their ice-cloak.

"I can look out for my own 'piping times'--thank you! And I'm not going
to buy any pig in a poke--take any leap in the dark."

The scout's reply was bristling. To a fifteen-year-old patrol leader, a
Henkyl Hunter, who went up and down upon the trail of a joke, there was
a smack of condescension about that "Buddy", used twice by those big
boys; perhaps he, too, at that moment, laid up something against the
youth of the flaming tone and rig.

"Humph! hasn't he the nerve, butting in?" he muttered.

"He has--has all sorts of nerve," agreed Pemrose readily, glancing
sideways after the boy whose courage she knew to be as high as his
colors.

"The Scoutmaster wouldn't hear of our venturing in so far as to
investigate that running water, anyhow," said Studley. "My eye! What's
the rumpus now--the kettle o' fish?"

It was a shriek from one girl--half-a-dozen girls. It was a loud hiss,
almost a whistle, from some pallid vegetation near the lake-edge. It was
a black snake rearing a blue-black head and glittering eye within three
feet of Una Grosvenor, novice among Camp Fire Girls, whose scream tore
at the very stones of Tory Cave until they cried out in echo.

It was a dozen green-clad girls scattering wildly this way and that,
olive-green aspen leaves tossing in a whirlwind, shuffling from pillar
to post--from rock to darkling rock.

It was--it was a powerful reptile form, in armor of jetty scales,
trailing its six-foot length away, the noise of its mighty tail-blows
against the earth and flying pebbles calling all the Dumps--the Doleful
Dumps--out of the dens where they hid here, making them take strange and
shadowy shap