Page:Adventures of Kimble Bent.djvu/31

Rh coarse rarauhe fern, in some places ten feet high, he looked around him. Directly across the river the bush began, the seemingly impenetrable forest solemn and dark, pregnant with danger and mystery Turning in the other direction, and facing the northwest, he could just discern in the distance the tops of a number of bell-tents—the camp he had left behind him. And as he looked his last on the tents of his comrades and his tyrants, he heard the sweet notes of a bugle sounding a call. The midwinter air was very clear and still. It was the midday mess call—"Come-to-the-cookhouse-door."

"No more cookhouse-door now, that's a moral," said the soldier aloud. "Pork and potatoes for you, me boy—or else a crack on the head with a tomahawk."

Beyond the tents, another tent-shaped object took the soldier's eye. It was a lofty snowy mountain, glittering in the midday sun. It was far away in the nor'-west, so far that its base was hidden by the intervening bush, and only the white symmetrical upper part of the vast cone, a wedge of white culminating in as perfect an apex as any bell-tent, was visible to the eye from this part of the great plains. It was the peak of Taranaki mountain, which the white man calls Mount Egmont.

Satisfying himself that there was no one in sight and that he was not followed, the soldier