The strips proved the next day to be all that Jarvis had promised, and they continued their journey with renewed elasticity, fair weather keeping them company. Deeper and deeper they went into the mountains. The region had all the aspects of a complete wilderness. Now and then they saw smoke, which Jarvis said was rising from the chimneys of log cabins, and once or twice they saw cabins themselves in sheltered nooks, but nobody hailed them. The news of the war had spread here, of course, but Harry surmised that it had made the mountaineers cautious, suppressing their natural curiosity. He did not object at all to their reticence, as it made traveling easier for him. They were now rowing along a southerly fork of the Kentucky. Another deer had been killed, falling this time to the rifle of Jarvis, and one night they shot two wild turkeys. Jarvis and his nephew would arrive home full handed in every respect, and his great tenor boomed out joyously over the stream, speeding away in echoes among the lofty peaks and ridges that had now turned from hills into real mountains. They towered far above the stream, and everywhere there were masses of the deepest and densest green. The primeval forest clothed the whole earth, and the war to which Harry was going seemed a faint and far thing. Traveling now became slow, because they always had a strong current to fight. Harry, at times when the country was not too rough, left the boat and walked along the bank. He could go thus for miles without feeling any weariness. Naturally very strong, he did not realize how much his work at the oar was increasing his power. The thin vital air of the mountains flowed through his lungs, and when Jarvis sang, as he did so often, he felt that he could lift up his feet and march as if to the beat of a drum. They left the fork of the Kentucky at last and rowed up one of the deep and narrow mountain creeks. Peaks towered all about them, a half mile over their heads, covered from base to crest with unbroken forest. Sometimes the creek flowed between cliffs, and again it opened out into narrow valleys. In a two days' journey up its course they passed only two cabins. "In ordinary water we'd have stopped thar," said Jarvis at the second cabin. "I know the man who lives in it an' he's to be trusted. We'd have left the boat an' the things with him, an' we'd have walked the rest of the way, but the creek is so high now that we kin make at least twenty miles more an' tie up at Bill Rudd's place. Thar's no goin' further on the water, 'cause the creek takes a fall of fifteen feet thar, an' this boat is too heavy to be carried around it." They reached Rudd's place about dark. He was a hospitable mountaineer, with a double-roomed log cabin, a wife and two small children. He volunteered gladly to take care of the boat and its belongings, while Jarvis and the boys went on the next day to Jarvis's home about ten miles away.