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to himself, Jasper Grinder piled the wood on the camp-fire and then sat down to meditate on the turn affairs had taken.

He was in a thoroughly sour frame of mind. To his way of thinking everything had gone wrong, and he wondered how matters would terminate.

"I was a fool to come out here, in the first place," he told himself. "I ought to have known that Baxter had no sure thing of it. If I hadn't fallen in with the Rovers, I would have frozen and starved to death. And they don't want me; that's plainly to be seen."

Had he felt able to do so, he would have packed a knapsack with provisions and started on his way down the river toward Timber Run. But he did not know how far the settlement was away, and he was afraid to trust himself alone in such a wilderness as confronted him on every hand. He did not possess much money, but he would have given every dollar to be safe back in the city again.