The body of the catamount landed just where he had stood; but then
rolled off the log and disappeared in the rushing stream, while the
timber itself crashed instantly into one of the larger boulders. Enoch
staggered to his feet, his hand bleeding and also his knee, where the
stocking had been torn away by the rock. The log swung broadside to the
current again, and seeing his chance, the boy ran along its length and
leaped from its end into comparatively shallow water under the bank.

His rescuer was at hand and dragged him, panting and exhausted, to the
shore, where he fell weakly on the turf, unable for a moment to utter a
word. The man who leaned over him was lean, as dark as an Indian, and in
a day when smoothly shaven features were the rule, his face was marked
by a tangled growth of iron-gray beard. His hair hung to the fringed
collar of his deerskin shirt, and straggled over his low brow in
careless locks, instead of being tightly drawn back and fastened in a
queue; and out of this wilderness of hair and beard looked two eyes as
sharp as the hawk's.

He was so tall that there was a slight stoop to his shoulders as though,
when he walked, he feared to collide with the branches of the trees
under which he passed. Erect, he must have lacked but a few inches of
seven feet and, possessing not an ounce of superfluous flesh on his big
bones, his appearance was not impressive. The deerskin hunting shirt,
worked in a curious pattern on the breast with red and blue porcupine
quills, fitted him tightly, as did his linsey-woolsey breeches; and his
thin shanks were covered with gray hose darned clumsily in more than one
place. He would have been selected at first sight as a wood-ranger and
hunter, and carried his long rifle with more grace than he ever held
plough or wielded reaping-hook.

Indeed, Josiah Bolderwood was one of that strange class of white men so
frequently found during the pioneer era of our Eastern country. He
seemed to have been born, as he often said himself, with a gun in his
hands. His mother, lying on her couch behind the double wall of a
blockhouse in the Maine wilderness, loaded spare guns for her husband
and his comrades while they beat off the yelling redskins, when Josiah
was but a few days old. He was a ranger and trapper from the beginning.
He had slept under the canopy of the forest more often than in a bed and
beneath a roof made by men's hands. From early youth he had hunted all
through the n