“I’ll do it too,” was the answering whisper.  “But let’s get higher up on the knoll, behind those big bushes at the top.  And listen, Dol, if a moose makes a noise anywhere near, we must scoot for the trees before he comes out from cover.  I’ve got to answer to your father for you.”

It was an intense moment in Dol Farrar’s life; sensation reached its highest pitch, as he crouched low behind a prickly screen, put the birch-bark horn to his mouth, and slowly breathed through it with the full power of his young lungs, marvellously strengthened by the forest life of past weeks.

There was a minute’s interval while he removed it again, and drew in all the air he could contain.  Then a call rose upon the evening air, so touching, so plaintive, with such a rising, quavering impatience as it surged out towards the woods,—­whither the boy-caller’s face was turned,—­that Cyrus could scarcely suppress a “Bravo!”

The summons died away in a piteous grunt.  A second time the call rose and fell.  On the third repetition it broke off, as usual, in an abrupt roar, which seemed to strike the tops of the giant trees, and boom among them.

A froth was on Dol Farrar’s lips, his eyes were reddened, he puffed hard through spread nostrils, like a young horse which has been trying its mettle for the first time, as he lowered that moose-horn, lifted his head, and cocked his ears to listen.

Two soundless minutes passed.  Dol, who, if he had mastered the hunter’s call, had certainly not mastered his patience, put the bark-trumpet again to his lips, determined to try the effect of a surpassingly expressive grunt.

But he never executed this false movement, which would have given away the trick at once.

A bellow—­a short, snorting, challenging bellow—­burst the silence, coming from the very edge of the woods.  It brought Cyrus to his feet with a jump.  It so startled the ambitious moose-caller, that, in rising hurriedly from his squatting position, he lost his balance, and rolled over and over to the bottom of the knoll, smashing the horn into a hundred pieces.

He picked himself up unhurt, but with a sensation as if all the bells in Christendom were doing a jumbled ringing in his head.  And loud above this inward din he heard the sound, so well remembered, as of an axe striking repeatedly against a tree, the terrible chopping noises of a bull-moose, not two hundred yards away.

No sooner had he scrambled to his legs, than Garst was at his side, gripping his arm, and forcing him forward at a headlong run.

“You’ve done it this time with a vengeance!” bawled the Bostonian.  “He’s coming for us straight!  And we without our rifles!  The trees!  The trees!  It’s our only chance!”

With the belling still in his head, and so bewildered by his terrible success that he felt as if his senses were shooting off hither and thither like rockets, leaving him mad, Dol nevertheless ran as he had never run before, shoulder to shoulder with his comrade, dashing wildly for a clump of hemlocks over a hundred yards distant.  Yet, for the life of him, he could not help glancing back once over his shoulder, to see the creature which he had humbugged, luring it from its forest shelter, and which now pursued him.