“Go down that, mebby,” he suggested, shrugging his shoulders to suggest that the experiment might be a dangerous one.

Rod looked over.  The top of the stub was within easy reach, and the whole tree was entirely free of bark or limbs, a fact which in his present excitement did not strike him as especially unusual.  Swinging his rifle strap over his shoulders he reached out, caught the slender apex of the stub, and before the others could offer a word of encouragement or warning was sliding down the wall of the rock into the chasm.  Wabi was close behind him, and not waiting for Mukoki’s descent the two boys hurried toward the cabin.  Half-way to it Wabi stopped.

“This isn’t fair.  We’ve got to wait for Muky.”

They looked back.  Mukoki was not following.  The old warrior was upon his knees at the base of the dead tree, as though he was searching for something among the rocks at its foot.  Then he rose slowly, and rubbed his hands along the stub as high as he could reach.  When he saw that Rod and Wabi were observing him he quickly came toward them, and Wabigoon, who was quick to notice any change in him, was confident that he had made a discovery of some kind.

“What have you found, Muky?”

“No so ver’ much.  Funny tree,” grunted the Indian.

“Smooth as a fireman’s brass pole,” added Rod, seeing no significance in Mukoki’s words.  “Listen!”

He stopped so suddenly that Wabigoon bumped into him from behind.

“Did you hear that?”

“No.”

For a few moments the three huddled close together in watchful silence.  Mukoki was behind the boys or they would have seen that his rifle was ready to spring to his shoulder and that his black eyes were snapping with something not aroused by curiosity alone.  The cabin was not more than twenty paces away.  It was old, so old that Rod wondered how it had withstood the heavy storms of the last winter.  A growth of saplings had found root in its rotting roof and the logs of which it was built were in the last stage of decay.  There was no window, and where the door had once been there had grown a tree a foot in diameter, almost closing the narrow aperture through which the mysterious inhabitants had passed years before.  A dozen paces, five paces from this door, and Mukoki’s hand reached out and laid itself gently upon Wabi’s shoulder.  Rod saw the movement and stopped.  A strange look had come into the old Indian’s face, an expression in which there was incredulity and astonishment, as if he believed and yet doubted what his eyes beheld.  Mutely he pointed to the tree growing before the door, and to the reddish, crumbling rot into which the logs had been turned by the passing of generations.

“Red pine,” he said at last.  “That cabin more’n’ twent’ t’ous’nd year old!”