CHAPTER XXXV

_The End of Camp Venture_

During the night of Tom's bear hunt, the boys slept soundly, wearied as they were by an especially hard day's work. About three o'clock a soldier from out under the bluff rushed in crying:

"Wake up! Wake up! Wake up! Your chimney's on fire!"

Then came the Lieutenant with a squad of soldiers to remove the wounded men from the hut. This was a work of some difficulty although all the men were now "making satisfactory recovery" as the Doctor phrased it. The Doctor took charge at this point because he knew as no one else did the exact nature and condition of each man's wound, and it was his care to see that none should be improperly handled or in any way injured in the removal. Yet the house burned so rapidly that there was very little time for care and the excited soldiers had to be sharply restrained by the Lieutenant to make them comply with every direction of the Doctor in their handling of the wounded men.

Meantime the boys removed from the house everything of value, including even the "piano," which they would need every day for the sharpening of their axes.

What had happened was this: the upper part of the chimney, as the reader will remember, had been built of sticks, laid in a crib, and daubed all over with mud. The sticks were green, full of sap and almost incombustible when placed in position, and besides that the mud daubing protected them. But little by little the mud had dried and fallen away. While the heat of a fire that was maintained night and day for many months had seasoned the sticks first and then dried and parched them to the condition of tinder, capable of being ignited by the merest spark.

That night the spark did its work. The chimney sticks caught fire and burned with fierce violence. The clapboards forming the roof and the resinous pine timbers that held them in place, had also been roasted into an exceedingly combustible condition, and by the time that the fire was discovered the house was obviously doomed. That was the origin of the light that Tom had seen in the direction of Camp Venture while waiting for his bear.

When he now entered the camp he found the boys getting breakfast by an out door fire, built near the mouth of the chute.

"Poor old Camp Venture!" he exclaimed. "How did it happen boys?"

They hastily explained especially answering Tom's eager questions as to the condition of the wounded men.

"They are quite comfortable," said the Doctor. "All possible care was taken in removing them from the burning house, and my examination discovers no trace of damage done to any of them. But where have you been and what have you brought back with you?" for Tom had no game in possession.

"I've been to the home and headquarters of Ursa Major, and I've killed him," answered Tom. "I want to borrow the Lieutenant's glass to-night to see how the heavens look without the constellation of the Great Bear."

"What do you mean, Tom?" asked the boys eagerly.

"Why simply that I have killed the biggest black bear I ever saw or heard of in these mountains."

"Where is it?" eagerly asked Jack, who had a great longing for fresh meat for breakfast that morning.

"It's out there just beyond the picket lines, and some of you must go after it. You see the mountaineers who 'held me up' and then made friends with me, agreed to bring it to camp under my solemn promise of safe conduct. Bill Jones was at the head of them. But as they drew near the camp and saw the pickets, their courage failed them and even my invitation to come and breakfast with us, could not entice them within the picket lines.

"'We don't want to take no risks,' they said, 'an' you kin bring out some fellers to git the bar, so ef you don't mind, we'll leave it right here an' say good mornin'.' And with that they scurried off up the mountain."

Jack, Harry, Ed and Jim volunteered to go out after the bear, and with no little difficulty they at last got him to camp, where they proceeded to dress him. Tom, in the meantime, ate such breakfast as there was on hand, and, rolling himself in his blanket, stretched his tired limbs before the fire and fell at once into slumber. The other boys left him asleep when they went to their work, but considerably before noon he joined them with his axe.

That night a "council of war," as they called it, was held.

"Now that our house is burned up," said Jack, "we may as well begin to get ready for our descent of the mountain. Of course, we could sleep out of doors in this spring weather, but there is no use in doing it longer than we must. We sent the last two bridge timbers down the chute to-day. We have only twenty more ties to get ready and if we work hard we can do that to-morrow and next day. That will leave us nothing more to do except to work up the waste into cordwood and send it down. My calculation is that we can leave here one week from to-morrow morning if we are reasonably industrious. Tom's bear and the other game he'll get, will keep us in meat for that time, and if the Doctor can leave his patients a week hence, we'll go."

"Oh, as to that," said the Doctor, "I could leave them now. They need nothing now but nursing, and it won't be very long after we leave before the road will be open for the lieutenant to send them all down the mountain."

Thus with glad thoughts of a speedy homing, the boys rolled themselves in their blankets and stretched themselves out to sleep by the fire and under the stars.

"By the way, Tom," said Jim, just as Tom was sinking into slumber, "you forgot to look for that hole in the sky that you made last night."

"Well, you'd better make a hole in your talk pretty quick, Jim, if you don't want a bucket of water poured over you," said Jack. "Lie awake as long as you like, but keep quiet and let the rest of us sleep."