which reposed upon the floor just beneath the
edge of his bunk.

The boy crept close, his soft moccasins making no sound, until he was
within reach of the gun, when he dropped to the floor and lifted it in
his hands. For many minutes he sat upon the floor examining the rifle,
turning it over and over.

At length he reached for the cartridge-belt, and buckling it about his
waist, left the room as noiselessly as he had entered and, keeping the
bunk-house in line with the window of the cook-shack, slipped
unobserved into the timber.

Upon his hunting expeditions with the others, Charlie had not been
allowed to carry a high-power rifle. It was a sore blow to his pride
that his armament had consisted of a light, twenty-gauge shotgun, whose
possibilities for slaughter were limited to rabbits, spruce-hens, and
ptarmigan.

Farther and farther into the timber he went, avoiding the outreaching
skidways and the sound of axes. Broad-webbed snow-shoe rabbits leaped
from under foot and scurried away in the timber, and the whir of an
occasional ptarmigan or spruce-hen passed unheeded.

He was after big game. He would show Uncle Appleton that he _could_
handle a rifle; and maybe, if he killed a buck or a wolf or a bobcat,
the next time he went with them he would be allowed to carry a
man's-size weapon.

An hour's tramp carried him to the bank of the river at a point several
miles below the camp, where he seated himself upon a rotten log.

"Blood River Jack just wanted to sleep to-day, so he told 'em it was
going to storm," he soliloquized as he surveyed the narrow stretch of
sky which appeared above the snow-covered ice of the river.

But somehow the sky did not look as blue as it had; it was a sickly
yellow color now, like the after-glow of a sunset, and in the center of
it hung the sun--a dull, copper sun, with uneven, red edges which lost
themselves in a hazy aureola of yellowish light.

The boy glanced uneasily about him. The woods seemed uncannily silent,
and the air thick and heavy, so that the white aisle of the river
blurred into dusk at its farther reaches.

It grew darker, a peculiar fuliginous darkness, which was not of the
gloom of the forest. Yet no smell of smoke was in the air, and in the
sky were no clouds.

"Looks kind of funny," thought the boy, and glanced toward the river.
Suddenly all thought of the unfamiliar-looking world fled from his
brain, for there on the snow, not twenty yards distant, half cro