Page:Lost with Lieutenant Pike (1919).djvu/211

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page needs to be proofread.
  • ing before the carcasses got cold and the hides stiff.

With Baroney's hatchet they cracked a marrow-bone apiece, so as to scoop out the fatty pith.

Presently the sun was high and warming. Two men were coming afoot up the valley. They brought no horses——

"Miller and Mountjoy, hein?" Baroney said, eyeing them as they drew nearer. "Where is the lieutenant, I want to know?"

Terry Miller and John Mountjoy they were; and they staggered and stumbled in their haste at sight of the meat.

"Did you lose the lieutenant? What?"

"No. He's gone on for camp, with the doctor. He sent us in here to eat. Give us some meat, quick."

"Nothing but one turkey and a hare for the three of us, these four days past," panted Terry, as he and John sucked and gobbled. "And in the last two days nothing at all."

"Go far?" Stub queried, eager to know.

"Away up, twenty-five miles or two camps above where the rest o' you left us. Up to where the river petered out to a brook betwixt the mountains. Then we turned back and traveled day and night with our clothes froze stiff on us, and our stomachs clean empty, to ketch the main camp. The cap'n was