"Oh, see! see!" she cried, all excitement in a moment. She seized the

rifle, and taking careful aim, fired. The chattering ceased; the

chipmunk disappeared.

Bennington ran to the log. Behind it lay the little animal. The long

steel-jacketed bullet had just grazed the base of its brain. He picked

it up gently in the palm of his hand and contemplated it.

It was such a diminutive beast, not as large as a good-sized rat, quite

smaller than our own fence-corner chipmunks of the East. It's little

sides were daintily striped, its little whiskers were as perfect as

those of the great squirrels in the timber bottom. In its pouches were

the roots of pine cones. Bennington was not a sentimentalist, but the

incident, against the background of the light-hearted day, seemed to

him just a little pathetic. Something of the feeling showed in his

eyes.

The girl, who had drawn near, looked from him to the dead chipmunk, and

back again. Then she burst suddenly into tears.

"Oh, cruel, cruel!" she sobbed. "What did I do it for? What did you

let me do it for?"

Her distress was so keen that the young man hastened to relieve it.

"There," he reassured her lightly, "don't do that! Why, you are a great

hunter. You got your game. And it was a splendid shot. We'll have him

skinned when we get back home, and we'll cure the skin, and you can

make something out of it--a spectacle case," he suggested at random. "I

know how you feel," he went on, to give her time to recover, "but all

hunters feel that way occasionally. See, I'll put him just here until

we get ready to go home, where nothing can get him."

He deposited the squirrel in the cleft of a rock, quite out of sight,

and stood back as though pleased. "There, that's fine!" he concluded.

With one of those instantaneous transitions, which seemed so natural to

her, and yet which appeared to reach not at all to her real nature, she

had changed from an aspect of passionate grief to one of solemn

inquiry. Bennington found her looking at him with the soul brimming to

the very surface of her great eyes.

"I think you may come up on my rock," she said simply after a moment.

They skirted the base of the dike together until they had reached the

westernmost side. There Bennington was shown the means of ascent, which

he had overlooked before because of his too close examination of the

cliff itself. At a distance of about twenty feet from the dike grew a

large pine tree, the lowest branch of which extended directly over the

little plateau and about a foot above it. Next to the large pine stood

two smaller saplings side by side and a few inches apart. These had

been converted into a ladder by the nailing across of rustic rounds.




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