The moose was charging after them full tilt, gaining rapidly too, his long thin legs, enormous antlers, broad, upreared nose, and the green glare in his starting eyes, making him look like some strange animal of a former earth.  Dol at last trembled with actual fear.  He gave a shuddering leap, and forced his legs, which seemed threatened with paralysis, to wilder speed.

“Climb up that hemlock!  Get as high as you can!” shrieked Cyrus, stopping to give him an upward shove as they reached the first friendly trunk.

Dol obeyed.  Gasping and wild-eyed, he dug his nails into the bark, clambering up somehow until he reached a forked branch about eight feet from the ground.  Here strength failed.  He could only cling dizzily, feeling that he hung between life and death.

The moose was now snorting like a war-horse beneath.  The brute stood off for a minute, then charged the hemlock furiously, and butted it with his antlers till it shook to its roots, the sharp prongs of those terrible horns coming within half an inch of Dol’s feet.

With a gurgle of horror the boy tried to reach a higher limb, and succeeded; for at the same moment a timely shout encouraged him.  Cyrus was bawling at the top of his voice from a tree ten feet distant:—­

“Are you all right, Dol?  Don’t be scared.  Hold on like grim death, and we can laugh at the old termagant now.”

“I’m—­I’m all right,” sang out Dol, though his voice shook, as did every twig of his hemlock, which the moose was assaulting again.  “But he’s frantic to get at me.”

“Never mind.  He can’t do it, you know.  Only don’t you go turning dizzy or losing your balance.  Ha! you old spindle-legged monster, stand off from that tree.  Take a turn at mine now, for a change.  You can’t shake me down, if you butt till midnight.”

Garst’s last sentences were hurled at the moose.  The Bostonian, having reached a safe height, thrust his face out from his screen of branches, waving first an arm, and then a leg, at the besieging foe, hoping that the force of those battering antlers would be directed against his hemlock, so that his friend’s nerves might get a chance to recover.

The ruse succeeded.  The moose, reminded that there was a second enemy, charged the other tree; stood off for a minute to get breath, then charged it again, snorting, bellowing, and knocking his jaws together with a crunching, chopping noise.

“Ha! that’s how he makes the row like a man with an axe—­by hammering his jaws on each other.  Well, well! but this is a regular picnic, Dol,” sang out Cyrus jubilantly, caring nothing for the shocks, and forgetting camp, water, peril, everything, in his joy at getting a chance to leisurely study the creature he had come so far to visit.

“I owe you something for this, little man!” he carolled on in triumph, as he watched every wild movement of the moose.  “This is a show we’ll only see once in our lives.  It’s worth a hundred dollars a performance.  Butt and snort till you’re tired, you ‘Awful Jabberwock!’”—­this to the bull-moose.  “We’ve come hundreds of miles to see you, and the more you carry on the better we’ll be pleased.”