The dense woods were intersected at long intervals by such half-obliterated paths; in their remote recesses lurked other rough shanties where a scout might read the "sign" that told of the hard life of the lumbermen. But neither vine-laced road nor shanty was easy of discovery for the uninitiated. "Whew! it kind o' brings the gooseflesh to be so far in the woods as this without having the least idea whether we're getting anywhere or not." Thus spoke Coombsie at the end of half an hour's steady tramping and plowing through the underbrush. "Are you sure that you know in which direction lies the cave called the Bear's Den, Leon? A logging-road runs past that, so I've heard." "Oh, we'll arrive there in time, I guess; Varney's Paintpot is somewhere in the same direction as the cave," replied the pseudo-leader evasively. "They're some distance apart, but we've made a bee-line from one to the other when I've been in the woods with my father or brother Jim." But these woods were a different proposition now, without an older head and more experienced woodlore to rely upon: Leon, who had never before posed as a guide through their mazes, secretly acknowledged this. He had not imagined that it would be so difficult to find one's way, unaided, in this wilderness of endless trees and underbrush, through whose changing aspects ran the same mystifying thread as if the gold-brown gloom of a shadowy hill-slope,--where only the sunbeams waltzing on dry pine-needles seemed alive,--or the jeweled twilight of a grassy alley bound a gossamer handkerchief about one's eyes, so that one groped blindfold against a blank wall of uncertainty. "Say! but I wish I had brought my pocket compass with me," groaned the scout. "Guess I didn't live up to our scout motto: BE PREPARED! But then--" he looked at his cousin--"we started out with the intention of going down the river and you objected to my trotting back for it, Marcoo, when we determined on a hike through the woods." "I was afraid that if the men knew what we were planning, they'd have headed us off as Toiney tried to do," confessed Marcoo candidly. "Well, I wish now that I had gone back; I could have packed the luncheon into my knapsack; it would have been much more easily carried than in this basket. I miss my staff too!" Nixon deposited the lunch-basket, with which he was now impeded, on the ground in a green woodland glade where the noble forest trees, red oak, cedar, maple, interspersed with an occasional pine, hemlock, or balsam fir, rose to a height of from sixty to a hundred feet, bordering a patch of open ground, starred with wildflowers, dotted with berries. Delicate queen's lace, purple gentians, starry wood-asters, waxen Indian pipes, made it seem as if this must be the wood-fairies' dancing-ground, where at night they rode a moonbeam from flower to flower, and sipped juice from the milk-berries, bunch-berries or scarlet fox-berries that strayed at intervals along the ground.