midnight
I held on to it like grim death . '' `` Good for you ! To lose a hundred-and-fifty-dollar gun when we 're starting into the wilds would be maddening . '' Then , just because they were extremely healthy , happy , vigorous fellows , whose lungs had been drinking in pure , exhilarating ozone and fragrant odors of pine-balsam and were thereby expanded , they took a cheerful view of this duck under , and made the midnight forest echo , echo , and re-echo , with peals and gusts and shouts of laughter , while they struggled to right their canoe . The merry jingles rang on in challenge and answer , repeating from both sides of the pond , until they reached at last the wooded slopes and mighty bowlders of Old Squaw Mountain , a peak whose `` star-crowned head '' could be imagined rather than discerned against the horizon , near the distant shore from which the hunters had started . Here echo ran riot . It seemed to their excited fancies as if the ghost of Old Squaw herself , the disappointed Indian mother who had , according to tradition , lived so long in loneliness upon this mountain , were joining in their mirth with haggish peals .