Bob, barking madly, had dashed into a little thicket a few paces ahead.
"Hold on!" McCarty cried, as Walter started forward with cocked gun. "Bob, Bob," he yelled. "Come here; come here, you fool."
But the dog did not instantly obey. Instead, from the thicket came the sound of a fierce struggle.
"What can be in there?" Walter asked anxiously. "It sounds as though Bob was getting the worst of it."
"He is, and he isn't," grinned the other. "Just wait a minute and you will see what I mean."
Walter did not have long to wait. Soon a few short barks announced that Bob had triumphed, and a moment later the dog emerged from the bushes, but not before a villainous odor had reached the boys' nostrils. So strong and sickening it was, that the lads retreated in haste.
"Get out of here; go home," ordered McCarty angrily. "Go home, you fool."
Bob stopped and eyed him reproachfully; then, as if in obedience to an oft-repeated lesson, he turned around and trotted back to camp.
McCarty chuckled as he gazed after him. "That's Bob's one failing," he said. "He will go out of his way to tackle a pole-cat. As soon as the scent of one battle wears off he goes out and seeks another. Seems like a regular mania with him. I sure hope he will not do as he did last time--when he went back to camp, sneaked into my tent and went to sleep on my cot. Whew! I had to burn my blankets and fumigate my tent before I could sleep in it again, but I guess I had better shut up. If we talk as we go along, we will never get near a deer."
Thus far the boys had been traveling through low, flat woods, scantily dotted with small pine trees and little thickets of spruces and oaks, but soon they began to enter an entirely different kind of country. Before them stretched a vast prairie, covered with grass and broken here and there by rising hummocks, densely wooded with pines, oaks and huge tropical trees. Every few hundred yards they saw grass ponds, or little sandy-bottomed lakes of crystal-clear water. Beside one of these little lakes the lads stopped to eat their lunch. It was full of fish of all sizes.
"I wish Chris was here," Walter observed. "He would have the time of his life yanking out those big fellows."
"Oh, he can get all the fishing he wants right close to camp," McCarty said. "I never saw such a country for fish in my life. Any hole that is deep enough to hold water is full of fish. Even the ditches the machine has left behind are full of little minnows already."