d, cheerfully.
"Never did ride across here I had the direction, but I'm blamed now if I
can tell which way thet was."

Helen gazed at him in consternation.

"Lost!" she echoed.

CHAPTER IX

A silence ensued, fraught with poignant fear for Helen, as she gazed
into Bo's whitening face. She read her sister's mind. Bo was remembering
tales of lost people who never were found.

"Me an' Milt get lost every day," said Roy. "You don't suppose any man
can know all this big country. It's nothin' for us to be lost."

"Oh!... I was lost when I was little," said Bo.

"Wal, I reckon it'd been better not to tell you so offhand like,"
replied Roy, contritely. "Don't feel bad, now. All I need is a peek at
Old Baldy. Then I'll have my bearin'. Come on."

Helen's confidence returned as Roy led off at a fast trot. He rode
toward the westering sun, keeping to the ridge they had ascended, until
once more he came out upon a promontory. Old Baldy loomed there, blacker
and higher and closer. The dark forest showed round, yellow, bare spots
like parks.

"Not so far off the track," said Roy, as he wheeled his horse. "We'll
make camp in Milt's senaca to-night."

He led down off the ridge into a valley and then up to higher altitude,
where the character of the forest changed. The trees were no longer
pines, but firs and spruce, growing thin and exceedingly tall, with
few branches below the topmost foliage. So dense was this forest that
twilight seemed to have come.

Travel was arduous. Everywhere were windfalls that had to be avoided,
and not a rod was there without a fallen tree. The horses, laboring
slowly, sometimes sank knee-deep into the brown duff. Gray moss
festooned the tree-trunks and an amber-green moss grew thick on the
rotting logs.

Helen loved this forest primeval. It was so still, so dark, so gloomy,
so full of shadows and shade, and a dank smell of rotting wood, and
sweet fragrance of spruce. The great windfalls, where trees were jammed
together in dozens, showed the savagery of the storms. Wherever a single
monarch lay uprooted there had sprung up a number of ambitious sons,
jealous of one another, fighting for place. Even the trees fought one
another! The forest was a place of mystery, but its strife could be read
by any eye. The lightnings had split firs clear to the roots, and others
it had circled with ripping tear from top to trunk.

Time came, however, when the exceeding wildness of the forest, in
densit