Now it worried him.
But his depression did not last long.

The big fire which Mukoki built and the stimulating aroma of strong coffee revived his natural spirits, and both Wabi and he were soon laughing and planning again as they made their cedar-bough shelter.

Supper on the big flat stone--a feast of bear steak, hot-stone biscuits, coffee, and that most delectable of all wilderness luxuries, a potato apiece,--and the two irrepressible young gold hunters were once more scheming and building their air-castles for the following day.

Mukoki listened, and attended to the clothes drying before the fire, now and then walking out into the gloom of the chasm to look up to where the white rim of the fall burst over the edge of the great rock above them.

All that afternoon Wabi and Rod had forgotten the mad hunter and the strange, smoothly worn tree.