After a few minutes, the trail left the road abruptly and vanished between the trees to the south.
"Some Indian must be making the round of his traps," Ethel commented. "We're coming to where used to be an old lumber camp for the woodmen," she said a little later, as the gray walls of old shacks appeared through the trees to the right. "No one's there now, but we keep one cabin sound and stocked with firewood."
"Oh, yes," Loutrelle recollected. "Redbird's Rest Cabin where you're to wait for the team."
He identified it easily out of the little group of deserted shacks which they approached. In addition to its being in better repair, a wire reached from the south and then stretched across the road and into the woods to the north, undoubtedly the telephone wire which the Indian had mentioned as all right from St. Florentin to the cabin and down beyond. Loutrelle pushed ahead and thrust open the weather-beaten door. He removed his skis and Ethel's also and stood them against the wall. They stamped down upon a dry, board floor. Loutrelle closed the door, and a single, rudely glazed window lighted the interior which was perhaps twelve feet square with an old bunk on one side; upon the other was a boulder fireplace with a couple of benches before it. A telephone instrument was upon the wall. There was dry wood and brush under the chimney, and Loutrelle struck a match and started a blaze which swiftly roared into red flame.
Ethel bent and swung out, an iron crane set in the fireplace. She took a battered kettle from a shelf which held, besides, a few cheap dishes and a couple of tin boxes and cans. When Loutrelle looked about, she handed him the kettle, and he filled it with snow
