I shall never forget the journey down to that lake. Winding here, winding there, using the axe frequently as the thin trees I mentioned were passed, and we entered the virgin forest below, close and tangled, we worked slowly down-hill; and it was with something of pleasure that we came at last again onto what looked like a trail through the forest. It was just like one of the field paths at home for breadth; but a perfect wall of tangled bush and trees netted together with a kind of tangled vine (the pea-vine, I believe it is called), closed it in on either side. We were on the track of the indomitable "buck" again, I thought. But it was not so. His trail had kept directly on upon the hill, Apache Kid told me. "I thought you saw it from the knoll there," he said, and then with a queer look on his face, "but you can’t go back now to look on it. Man, do you know that a hunger takes me often to go back and see just such places as that on the summit there? I take an absolute dread that I must die without ever seeing them again. There are places I cannot allow myself to think of lest that comes over me that forces—aye, forces—me to go back again for one look more. I love a view like that more than ever any man loved a woman." Donoghue looked round to me and touched his forehead and shook his head gently. "Rathouse," he said: "crazy as ever they make ’em." "But this is a trail we have come onto, sure enough," I said. My companions looked at it quietly and I noticed how they both at once unslung their Winchesters from their shoulders, for Donoghue had again taken his share of our burdens. "Not exactly a trail," said Apache Kid, "at least, neither an Indian’s trail nor a buck’s trail this time. What was that, Donoghue?" A sharp crack, as of a branch broken near us, came distinctly to our ears. Donoghue did not answer directly but said instead: "You walk first; let Francis here in the middle. I ’ll come last," and Donoghue dropped behind me. Apache nodded and we started on our way. Neither to left nor right could we see beyond a few feet, so close did the underbrush still whelm the way. The sound of our steps in the stillness was more eerie than ever to my ears. I felt that I should go barefoot here by right, soundless, stealthy, watching every foot of the way for a lurking death in the bushes. "Crack," sounded again a broken branch on our left. "Well," said Apache, softly—I was treading almost on his heels and Donoghue was close behind me—"twigs don’t snap of their own accord like that in mid-summer." We kept on, however, not hastening our steps at all, but at the same even, steady pace, and suddenly again in the stillness—"Crack!" Again a branch or twig had snapped near by in the thick woods through which we could not see. *CHAPTER XVII* _*The Coming of Mike Canlan*_