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White Hands

Winslow let his pig-skin kit-bag go down with a clump. It struck the mirroring parquetry singularly like the stamp of an angry foot. Then he grunted aloud as he groped for the next light switch.

It was merely another evidence of their placid incompetence, he felt, that nobody should have answered his ring, that every overfed servant in the place should be asleep. And it made a fine home-coming, this silence and emptiness that reminded him of a state museum locked up for the night. He felt, indeed, as he moved forward from room to room, switching on the hidden constellations of lights, oddly out of place in those shadowy and softly-tinted chambers that should have brought peace to his spirit. It seemed mighty little like home to the big-bodied man with the weathered face and the ruminative eyes. It was five long months, he remembered, since he had walked through those rooms, since his shadow had fallen across that threshold. And a new wistfulness crept into his solemnly appraising eyes as he stepped in through the doorway of the library and let his gaze rest on an ember or two that still glinted from the half-burned hickory logs in the open fireplace.

He noticed, with a revival of interest, the moose-head above the dark mantel, the belligerent big bull that he had brought down, eleven years ago, in his first trip out of Mattawa. Then his glance fell to the big bear-rug before the shimmering bronze fender, to the huge Kadiak that he had shot, still earlier, on the border of Alaska. And he found something almost friendly, amid the room that lay about him as remote and impersonal as a mausoleum, in the familiar mounted head and the perpetuated snarl of the white-fanged mouth.

It was a souvenir of struggle, he remembered as he moved on into the warm-aired room, and it was through struggle that man lived and proclaimed his manhood. His daughters had the habit of laughing at those trophies of his, of saying they made the house look like a cross between a zoological garden and a museum of natural history. But they were evidences of a saner life, he inwardly maintained, saner than the soft-cushioned Chesterfield that blocked his path and the mauve-jacketed French novels that littered the reading-table.

Winslow’s frown deepened, in fact, as he stopped beside an ash-tray heaped with a telltale pyramid of gilt-tipped cigarette ends. He regarded them studiously, and as studiously regarded a half-emptied carton of dried fruit and a silver tray on which stood three empty cocktail glasses and a hammered silver shaker still faintly redolent of sweetened orange-juice and alcohol. And of juniper, of juniper, oddly enough, that made him think of Laurentian rock-ridges, sun-steeped and splashed with blue-green shrub-clumps, where the whorls of dark-blue berries nested in their sprays of dark-green spines and the aromatic resins meant widened sky-lines and cleaner air to breathe. Yet men took those berries and scabbarded the raw blade of the rawest liquors in their northern sweetness.

Winslow’s manner was still thoughtful as he picked up a small glove and straightened it out between his strong thick fingers. He could not be sure whether it was Paddy’s or Janet’s. But he stood arrested by the smallness of that glove, by the incredible narrowness of the palm, by the slenderness of the tapering fingers, by the fineness of the kid, slightly soiled and stained here and there by dried splashes that might have been tear-drops, but were probably the drippings from a glass-stem. He was staring down at a crumpled sable coat, flung carelessly over a chair-arm, and wondering if this implied that at least one of his daughters was at home, when he was interrupted by the muffled small shrill of a bell.

He assumed it to be the call-bell of a telephone, but the shrill sound was repeated for the second time before he succeeded in locating the instrument beneath the voluminous flounces of a blue-and-gold Madame du Barry. He remembered, as he pushed that foolish and feminine contraption scornfully aside, that it was too late for Blake to be calling him up from the office. But he was deliberately slow in answering the impatient metallic clangor repeating itself for the third time.

“What is it?” he asked as he took up the receiver, his deep voice barbed with a note of resentment.

“Speak to Paddy, please,” announced the voice over the wire. It was a man’s voice, soft, suave, self-assured, a voice that Winslow both resented and disliked.

“Could I take the message?” he asked with coerced patience.

“Who are you?” was the coolly insolent question over the wire.

“What do you want?” countered the heavy-bodied man with the transmitter in his hand. He saw, by the French clock on the mantel, that it was within a half-hour of midnight.

“Connect me with Patience, please,” was the crisp command that came in to him.

“But who are you?” insisted the father of that young lady.

“None of your business, Old Top. But I want Paddy, and I want her quick.”

Winslow’s face darkened as he slammed down the receiver. He stood motionless for a moment or two studying the call-bell as it renewed its insolent shrill summons. Then he turned on his heel and strode on through the house that seemed so unlike a home. He was breathing more heavily as he went up the dark-wooded stairway. His face remained grim as he stopped at his younger daughter’s bedroom door, turned the knob and swung the door open.

The lights were on, in that room that lay before him a confusion of exotic colors and perfumes, but Paddy was not there. He spoke her name aloud, after swinging shut the door behind him, crossed to the bathroom of white marble and silver, saw that it was empty, and once more stood thoughtful-eyed before the bigger room with its commingling colors and shadows, with its conflicting air of disorder and luxury. Then slowly and thoughtfully he assessed the chamber in which he stood. He studied the Italian painted bed, with its banked lace pillows and its silk and damask covering and its ridiculous gilt Cupids along the carved face of the head-board. His reconnoitering eye took in the lingerie flung so carelessly over its foot-board, the flimsy cobwebs of tinted silk tossed along the crumpled counterpane, the pair of flesh-colored silk stockings hung over a chair-arm. On the Venetian table at the foot of the bed he saw a brocaded box of bonbons. Some of them, he noticed, had been bitten into and discarded. Beside them stood a chased silver photograph-frame holding the picture of a broad-shouldered youth in football togs, a youth quite unknown to the man looking down at the print, but more open-faced than the second attitudinizing figure in a heavier frame, with the name of one of the momentary heroes of the screen slashing across one corner. Strewn about between a chased gold cigarette case and a monogrammed silver flask with a heavy dent in its metal side, Winslow caught sight of a number of other photographs, snapshots of bathing parties, of a racing-car crowded with boys and girls, of a swimming-pool with a human frieze of bare-legged figures about its lip, of Paddy herself aqua-planing on a surf-board, of Paddy and an unknown young man mounted on horses and dated “Aiken, October 22nd.”

Winslow’s frown deepened as he moved on to his daughter’s dressing-table. There, amid the glitter of gold and glass and silver, he caught sight of other indecipherable photographs, one of a man in uniform, obviously of the navy, another laconically signed “The Icicle,” and a third bearing the inscription: “Yours to the last cinder, Larry.” About them lay heavily embossed toilet articles, brushes and combs, powder-boxes and lip-sticks, rouge and mascara and unidentifiable war-paint in Parisian-looking containers, the paraphernalia of feminine decoration, with jewelry tossed carelessly here and there about the table-top, rings and bar-pins, a tiny watch with a broken crystal, an odious jeweled garter. And on the floor beside the table was a scattering of slippers, satin and suede and serpent-skin, some buckled and decorated with brilliants, vivid-colored and incredibly small and bewilderingly gay-looking, even in their careless disorder, as though they had been kicked aside by tiny feet tired of dancing, tired of the moan of saxophones and the throb of drums and the negroid music that once pulsed along the banks of the Congo.

The faint lip-curl of contempt remained on Winslow’s face as he turned over a Brussels edition of Ulysses and picked up a copy of Casanova’s Home-Coming, muttering “Trash!” as he tossed it down again beside an embossed phone-pad scribbled over with numbers in an unformed and scrawling hand. The truculent light was still in his eye as he studied a second low table on which lay scattered still further esoteric instruments and lotions of beauty, ivory nail-files and buffers and manicure-sticks, polishes and stains and bleaches and pastes. Those, he knew, were for the modern woman’s hands that had no part in the grim purposes of life, for the hands of his own children.

And Winslow, still frowning, stepped back to the picture of his daughter so carelessly and yet so resolutely mounted on the hunter with the pointed ears. She was his own child, his Paddy of other days, but she now seemed a stranger to him. It startled him, when he began to reckon up the years, to discover that she would be twenty on her next birthday. And that, he remembered, implied that Jinny must already be twenty-three. He had thought of them as children, as children about whom he was still struggling to throw the inalienable protection of wealth, the one tangible security that could be passed on to them. But they were grown women now, women leading their own lives, remote from his influence, estranged from his understanding, divorced apparently from what he had so long looked upon as the decencies of life. And he had not made them secure, he remembered as he glanced about the room that smelled like a Turkish harem and made him think of a Tunisian bazaar. He had not controlled them and guided them and kept watch over them. He had lost contact with them and had been blindly satisfied, in the distractions of big business, to let them go their own way. And this, he said as he stood in the open doorway and stared back into that mutely eloquent room of his younger daughter, was the result of his indifference, the price that was being paid for his blindness.

Winslow’s step was heavy as he went down the stairs again. It was well after midnight, he saw as he reentered the library, where, with the casual adroitness of a man long-trained in woodcraft, he stirred up the dead coals in the fireplace and soon had a hickory log blazing behind the fender. Then he drew a heavy arm-chair up before the blaze, and, having seated himself, slowly and deliberately lighted a cigar. Yet the eyes with which he stared into the fire were unqualifiedly unhappy eyes. The savor of success that had soothed his tired body all the way down from the North went out of his bones, leaving in its wake a wayward sense of age and wasted effort. He felt depressed and vaguely alone in the world. And his unrest increased as he lighted a second cigar and added another log to the dying fire and felt the dark silence of the house weigh upon him like a promise of impending disaster.

His brow was heavy as he looked up at a second ringing of the telephone. And his frown deepened as he once more took up the receiver.

“Paddy there?” asked a careless baritone voice.

“She is not,” barked Winslow.

“How about Jinny?” lilted the imperturbable low voice.

“Just what do you want?” demanded the thick-shouldered man at the telephone.

“I rather thought I wanted a night-cap,” was the insolently tranquil reply.

“And you expected to get it in my house, at this hour of the morning?”

The thunder in that brought a momentary silence to the other end of the wire.

“Who are you, anyway?” was the slightly petulant query.

“Come over here,” asserted Winslow, “come over here for any of your night-caps, and you’ll know so quick your empty head will spin!”

And his hand was none too steady as he slammed the receiver back on its hook. He was still glowering at the dying fire when the double silvery chime of the mantel-clock told him it was two o’clock.

Two o’clock. That impressed him as an appallingly late hour for young girls to be abroad. He could feel recurring waves of alarm, crested with indignation, sweep through his body. He was looking at his watch again, to confirm the time, when he heard the distant thud of a door, a single note of laughter as thin and hard as the recent clock-chime and then the repeated thump of a door carelessly swung shut.

Winslow’s jaw hardened. There was an ominous light in his eyes as he got grimly up from his chair. But before he was quite prepared for it his daughter Janet stood in the doorway regarding him with languid surprise.

“Look who’s here!” she said with a casual audacity that both angered and depressed him. Yet the one thought that survived, as he stared at her from his impersonal heights of hostility, was a stubborn impression of her beauty. It was a hard and diamond-like sort of beauty, with more glitter than glow, but as the thin-bodied young woman with the unnaturally pallid face and the unnaturally bright lips stepped into the room and tossed aside a sea-green cloak made heavy with fur, she gave an impression of bored and somewhat wilful beauty. That impression, however, brought anything but happiness to the still frowning face of her father.

“Where’s Paddy?” he demanded.

“How should I know?” countered the slim-necked woman with the shingle bob.

“She’s your sister,” he grimly reminded her.

“And your daughter,” was Janet’s too casual retort as she reached for a cigarette.

Winslow winced at that, holding himself in with an effort. He was, in his own world, singularly unaccustomed to insolence and insurrection. He was not used to frustrations. Yet he seemed to stand doubly frustrated before this insolent-eyed young woman who owed everything she had in life to him and his labor.

“Where have you been?” he demanded, with his watch in his hand.

“Doing the same old turns,” she answered over her shoulder. And her shrug seemed one of ennui.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he reminded her, his face darkening with resentment.

“I guess I’m not used to answering questions,” she said, with an indifferent look about for an ash-tray.

His anger sharpened. But even as he became more acutely conscious of her opposition he nursed a disturbing suspicion that some trace of that feral spirit of hers might have come from himself.

“I suppose,” he said with a carefully achieved tolerance, “you’ve been pretty well living your own life?”

“Haven’t you?” was the curt demand from his daughter.

“Perhaps I have,” he finally, admitted. “Though I still have a slight interest in what you’re doing—and in what you are.”

She seemed to resent his pointed stare at her thinly clad body and her thickly powdered face.

“I thought you were rather leaving us to ourselves,” she said with a moue of unconcern.

“My work keeps me pretty well in the North,” he reminded her, even as he realized that his dignity was being wasted on the iron of her disdain.

“Otherwise you wouldn’t be known as the pulpwood king,” she added, as for the first time she let her quick and intent gaze rest on the russet square face of her father.

And in spite of his anger, as he looked into those eyes, those shadowed and restless and oddly unsatisfied eyes, he experienced an inapposite feeling of pity for her.

“Otherwise,” he nevertheless amended, “you wouldn’t be leading the life you are.”

Her sigh, small and listless, brought home to him how impervious she was to his anger.

“Well, I’m not so crazy about it,” she acknowledged with a sigh that was as unlooked-for as the note of bitterness in her voice.

“Then a decided change in it won’t come as a shock to you,” he said with an answering note of bitterness that brought her cool stare sluing slowly about to him.

“Are you going to change it?” she ventured, her words seeming more of a challenge than a question.

“I am,” answered her father. He spoke with more heat than he had intended. “Where is your sister Patience?”

His daughter’s small shoulder-movement, insouciant and defiant, did not escape him.

“Probably Daniel-Booning through the black-and-tans,” was the deliberately callous retort.

“Does she still sleep at home?” he demanded, prompted to match savagery with savagery.

“When she sleeps,” was the laconic reply.

“Then I assume you are not greatly interested in your younger sister’s welfare?” demanded Winslow, trying to smother his helplessness in a show of passion.

“Are you?” was his daughter’s ice-cold inquiry.

“I’m her father,” cried the big-framed man with the slightly tremulous hands. “But that doesn’t seem to mean a great deal in this present day.”

“It doesn’t seem to, does it?” concurred the bright-eyed young woman with her hands so slightly clasped over her crossed knees.

Winslow, instead of replying to that over-provocative question, sat abruptly down in his chair again. He sat studying his daughter’s hands, the hands of which she seemed so proud. They impressed him as abnormally small and delicate and white, as emblems of her helplessness, as a paraded announcement of inadequacy. He could see the light refracted from the narrow and pointed finger-nails, the finger-nails so sedulously polished and tinted and shaped and guarded. He could see the soft white skin over the phalanges, the skin that had been so carefully protected from wind and weather, from the casual blemishes of toil and time. They were futile and helpless hands, openly proclaiming their aloofness from all manual labor, a symbol of her character, an index of her soul, a tribal advertisement of incompetency.

Nature had originally fashioned them for grasping, for intricate and cunning movements, for the accomplishment of womanly tasks, for patient strength and endurance, for the once complicated business of life. Even they, like his own thick and strong-sinewed hands, had been intended for the furthering of worldly safety and worldly well-being. But these small white hands of his daughter, he felt, were like flowers. They were in no sense instruments of service, but ends in themselves, something to be admired for their delicate lines and their pallid tones, to be valued and treasured because of their very fragility. They were too small to hold what he had once dreamed of giving them. They were too weak to cling to what life might have offered them. They may have been as white as snow-flakes. But they were foolish, foolish and self-defeating. They effected nothing. They accomplished nothing. They could achieve nothing worth while. They were atrophied and useless, as barbaric as the arrogantly stunted foot of a Chinese princess.

Janet must have become conscious of her father’s scrutiny of those lightly clasped hands, for she drew the interlocked fingers slowly apart and looked at them with a vaguely interested eye. She even brushed a trace of tobacco-ash from one pink and narrow nail.

“I suppose you’re going to wait up for Paddy?” she finally inquired out of the prolonging silence.

“I am,” proclaimed her indignant father.

“It may be quite a long wait,” was Janet’s diffident-noted retort. And the sheer effrontery of her attitude, her cool indifference to his natural anxiety, brought home to him for the second time how far she had traveled from her own father’s side, from both his authority and his influence.

“Well, I’ll see it’s the last one,” he said with a renewing grimness. And still again he saw the languid shoulder-movement of disdain as the woman in the fragile sheath of green silk languidly rose to her feet.

“Then I’ll not wait for the fire-works,” she murmured with studied unconcern as she gathered up her wraps and started toward the door, the voluminous white-fox border trailing behind her like a tired wing.

Winslow was on the point of calling her back, of letting loose on her the accumulating flood of his anger, of telling her a few plain truths that might shock her back to reality. That, he remembered, was what he did with his equals, with the men of his business world, with the weaklings who failed him in emergency. But it was different with this slender and rose-tinted stranger, this indecipherable woman who still housed under his roof, this forlornly fragile figure that had grown up under glass. It would be as foolish, after all, as cannonading a canary, as setting a bear-trap to catch a butterfly. And again, as he stood watching his daughter trail off into the silence of the house, he knew that feeling of frustration which creeps doubly bitter into the breast of a man of power.

He fell to pacing the rug between the soft-cushioned Chesterfield and the dark-wooded table where his daughter’s forgotten gloves still lay in the lamp-light, stopping, from time to time, to look down at his watch.

“There must be some way out,” he muttered aloud, as he stared down at the Kadiak bearskin that lay at his feet. That skin, oddly enough, reminded him of a Blackfoot legend he had heard on one of his northern trips, the story of a great chief’s son who lay sick unto death in his father’s teepee and was told by the medicine-man of the tribe that health would never be his until he slept on the skin of a bear which he had killed with his own hand. So the ailing youth, gathering what remained of his strength, went forth to seek his magical pelt. And according to the legend, he traversed long trails and threaded dark forests and climbed great hills, until, in the end, he met and slew the bear whose pelt he slept upon, a sound and hardened hunter who had long since forgotten his sickness.

Winslow, as he looked at the litter of cigarette ends and the thin glasses still tainted with their residuary streaks of orange-juice and alcohol, wondered if there were not a moral to the story worth remembering.

Winslow, as he sat watching the clock, grew more and more wide-awake with a slowly eddying indignation. His home, he felt, was no longer a home. It was only the empty shell of one, as lifeless as the bear-rug at his feet. It was merely the dead carcass out of which the spirit had vanished, as foolishly impressive as the stuffed moose-head over his mantel. It had been intricately organized, as a machine is organized, but it had failed to function. And he as a father was equally a failure.

He stared about, as the incompetent small mantel-clock chimed three, as though in search of some central point against which to direct a still unformulated indignation. He was reaching for his watch, to corroborate that incredible hour, when through the quietness of the house he caught the sound of distant voices. There seemed to be two of them, one low and one light, and for the second time that night, as he listened, he heard a snatch of laughter, brittle and reckless. He knew then that it was Paddy, his younger daughter. He could hear her approaching steps, softer on the cushioning rugs, louder on the polished parquetry, and the heavier steps of the man who came with her.

Winslow was on his feet, with his watch still in his hand, grimly awaiting that unknown man, awaiting him with an accumulating ferocity that left the thick fingers holding the watch a trifle unsteady.

But the anger ebbed from his face as the two figures appeared in the open doorway. For the larger figure, he saw at a glance, was his old friend, Peter Summers. And it seemed consistent enough that a family counselor so tried and trusted should be supporting the slender-bodied girl by an arm thrust under her elbow. Yet the thought that Peter Summers was a physician, a man of medicine to be called on in emergency, sent Winslow’s glance back to his daughter, who laughed a trifle unsteadily at the fear so suddenly showing itself in her father’s face.

“Hello, Dad!” she said with an oddly blithe friendliness as she was led forward into the stronger fulcrum of light.

And Winslow saw, as he stared at her, that she was more shaken than she pretended. About her left fore-arm he noticed a white bandage. And what he had first accepted as a tiptilted white turban about her head proved to be a second bandage, made of layer on layer of neatly wound cotton gauze. Nor did his alarm subside as his eye ran down the wavering figure and he caught sight of a small splash of blood on one light silk stocking. What mystified him most, however, was the forlornly draggled look, the general wet-hen aspect, of the over-valorously smiling girl.

“It’s nothing to worry over,” Peter Summers promptly explained. “It’s mostly cream puffs.”

“Cream puffs?” echoed the perplexed parent.

“Paddy’s car,” announced Peter as he pushed that young lady down into an arm-chair, “ran into a baker’s wagon an hour or so ago. It was loaded with cream puffs. And Paddy got pretty well mixed up with them. When she came and rooted me out of bed, in fact, she looked considerably like a charlotte-russe.”

“Is she hurt?” demanded Winslow, with a quick glance at his daughter. She seemed alive enough, with her bright lips and her bright eyes and the aura of youth that even whipped cream and weariness could not altogether obliterate.

“Merely a scratch or two,” retorted the man of medicine. “But I’d hate to say what her car looks like. And I guess you’ll have to pay for a truck and twelve hundred cream puffs.”

Winslow’s movement was one of impatience. His frown deepened as he watched his daughter reach for a cigarette, which she held in her hand without lighting. And the familiar smallness and feebleness of that overwhite hand left his glance more somber than ever.

“It was rotten luck, really,” the girl in the arm-chair was saying. “That Harlem beak told me he’d give me sixty days if I got in another road mix-up. And here I’ve gone and done it!”

Winslow’s face hardened.

“What was it before?” he demanded.

“It was a milk wagon. Now I’ve moved up into the cream class!”

It was on the bigger of the two men that her laugh grated most. Yet the physician shrugged, condoningly, as their glances met.

“You’d better get to bed,” commanded Peter, handing the girl a vanity-case slightly stained with grease and road-dust. “And stay there until I see you to-morrow.”

She stopped for a moment to stare into his troubled face.

“The devil I will!” she said with casual effrontery as she picked up her things. But the starry softness of her smile took the barb from those four carelessly spoken words.

It was Peter, and not her father, who pointed toward the door. And the girl, although she made a face at him, started obediently enough to go.

“Me for the hay then!” she murmured as she limped away.

“Good night, grafter,” Peter called after her.

She did not answer him. She merely lifted her white hand in a gesture established by tradition as the last word in insolence. But even as she did so her smile was both companionable and tender.

Peter, dropping into a chair, found it hard to keep his sigh from being an audible one. But he smiled defensively and quietly reached for a cigarette as he caught the grimness on the face of the broad-shouldered man confronting him.

“What’s the answer to all this?” was Winslow’s sudden demand.

“I guess you’ve got it,” was Peter’s laconic retort.

Winslow flung himself into a chair. The other man watched him as he took out a cigar, bit off the end, and struck a match.

“Then what’s the cause of it?” exacted the older man, letting the match burn out between his fingers.

“You haven’t been around much,” the grave-eyed man of medicine reminded him.

“I’ve my work to look after.”

“You’ve two grown-up girls to look after,” amended the other.

“But I left that German woman, Frau Jenner, to keep an eye on them. They knew they had——”

“But what control can an out-dated old hen like that have over the girl of to-day?” interrupted the other, an obvious note of impatience in his voice. He was thinking, at the moment, of how the bigger man had once asked the Bishop to have a few words with Janet, which was about as futile as requesting a Great Dane to confer with a garter-snake.

“Are they any different from the girl of yesterday?” was Winslow’s combatively curt inquiry.

“They seem to be,” said the narrower-shouldered man with the frosted temples. And the silence prolonged between them.

“But, as you’ve said, my girls are grown up,” proclaimed Winslow as he reached for another match. “I can’t shadow them night and day and keep them from making arrant fools of themselves. I’d done what I could for them. I thought I’d started them off in the right direction. I did everything a father could. I gave them everything they asked for.”

“Perhaps that’s the trouble,” suggested the quiet-eyed Peter.

“But they had a decent mother,” contended the perplexed man of affairs, his mental gropings oddly suggestive of a penguin out of its element. “They had her care and influence for nearly fifteen years. And even after they lost that, I did my best not to coddle them. I tried to leave ’em open-eyed and self-reliant, able to paddle their own canoe. And this is what they’ve done with their freedom!”

Peter’s frown was a contemplative one.

“Perhaps they’re not so bad as you imagine,” he finally suggested. “You see, John, there have been some pretty big changes in the world since you and I were saplings. There’s not much left of the home, as we knew it, and God Bless Our Flat doesn’t seem to carry as well as the old phrase. Then, authority has rather taken a tumble; and our old-fashioned morality seems to be in an awful mix-up; and woman’s been given her freedom and is a little dizzy over it; and to-day we call a leg a leg and revel in frankness and jazz life up until it looks like delirium tremens to us comfortably detached outsiders. And they’re so hungry for sensation that they swallow it whole. But the world, you’ll notice, keeps on going. It has a way of doing that. And this younger generation that’s been keeping us up nights worrying over them appear to be developing their own immunities. They seem to have acquired what in my profession would be called moral mithridatism. They’re much more hard-boiled than we were, John, and they seem to slide untouched through experiences that would have bowled the pre-Raphaelites over like nine-pins.”

“You can’t play with fire without getting your fingers burned,” maintained Winslow.

“But people in rubber gloves seem able to handle live wires,” averred the other. “And this younger generation of salamanders seems to be growing its own new-age insulating matter. It’s buckled up in a brittle armor of hardness that the old poisonous arrows simply can’t get through. For these youngsters are a blamed sight more practical and prudent than we all imagine. They even have a code of their own, a code mixed up with the love of good sportsmanship and a horror of cheapness and an avoidance of the stuff you can’t get by with, as they’re apt to put it.”

“Well, I call it a mighty low-grade code that leads girls into street-collisions and intemperance and negro night-clubs and lets them drink and dance and run about with men who have about as much respect for womanhood as a black puma has for a ewe lamb!” Winslow, in the heat of his feeling, brought his sledge-hammer fist down on the end of the reading-table. “And my daughters are not going to do it.”

“How’ll you stop them?” asked Peter, one eyebrow up.

“I don’t know yet,” retorted Winslow. “But it’s going to be done.”

Peter’s smile was wistful and without malice.

“There has, of course, been a trifle too much Liberty Bell in their little American lives.”

“Then they can get ready for a Bull Run!”

Peter sat back, pensive-eyed, while that statement translated itself into reason.

“There’s Jinny,” he pursued, with professional calm. “She’s really unselfish, in her own way. But her way’s all wrong. And she’s still wondering why the thirteenth bluepoint can lose its savor. And there’s Paddy. You christened her Patience, yet people insist on calling her Paddy. That’s almost an explanation in itself.”

“And another example of dignity being scrapped for smart-aleckry!”

“On the contrary,” contended Peter, “it’s more the modern tendency to bowl over the last of our ancient pomposities and scratch around for a few of the endearing intimacies that can keep these poor old over-indurated lives of ours still livable. The young, you see, still have the trick of doing that.”

“By bowling over milk-wagons!” barked Winslow.

But the younger man disregarded the truculence in that cry.

“Your obvious mistake,” he went on with a deliberately maintained patience, “is in reckoning these girls as ewe lambs. They’re not that at all, not by a long shot. They keep, in fact, a mighty shrewd weather-eye out for the main issue. But they demand life, in some form or another. They want to function and work and show themselves worth while in the general scheme of things. It’s a human enough craving. But civilization, or whatever you want to call it, has taken that chance away from them. Machinery to-day does about everything that once kept their grandmothers busy. Their sewing and baking and canning and preserving is all done in factories. They sit with empty hands, wondering——”

“Ha,” flung out Winslow as he rose to his feet, “did you ever see their hands?”

“Whose hands?” inquired the more slender-bodied man.

“My daughters’,” was the answer, “Jinny’s and Paddy’s. They’re about as competent as a canary’s claw. They couldn’t build a fire and knead a loaf of bread if they were next door to starvation. They couldn’t——”

He stopped abruptly, for some reason, and stood staring somber-eyed down at the Kadiak bear-rug beneath his feet. And Peter Summers could afford to smile at his solemnity.

“But we haven’t so many battles left to fight with our hands, in this, our year eleven Anno Moscoviæ,” maintained the man in the chair. “That belonged to the pioneers, the pioneers we can envy but never imitate. They didn’t have to sit down and worry about where to get busy. They had real building to do, something to work for.”

Winslow turned on the other man.

“Well, there’s still the world’s work to be done,” he protested, “and somebody has to do it. You’re doing it and I’m doing it—at least our share of it. But I can’t see where this new race of young idlers and empty-headed and selfish-spirited sensation-hounds are adding anything to your silver-plated civilization.”

“Give ’em a chance!” murmured the suaver-eyed man of medicine.

“They’ve had their chance,” contended the rougher-voiced man confronting him. “They’ve had ’em, time and time again, and they’ve thrown ’em away. And the only thing left now is to take their chance away from them, their chance of being slack and selfish and self-indulgent. The fact is, Peter, we’ve been a damned sight too generous with the American woman. We’ve given her everything she’s whimpered for. We’ve made her so soft and spineless that she knows no more about life, real life, than a poodle-dog does.”

“On the contrary,” was the quieter-noted rejoinder of the other, “she knows too hanged much about it. But she doesn’t seem able to adjust her knowledge to experience. She can’t function the way the ten thousand ghosts of her ancestors keep telling her to function. She can’t scratch down to hard-pan. Take Paddy, for instance. You probably regard her as little more than a child. But Paddy could tell you things that would make your hair curl. And she’s not a bad kid, remember. She’s merely thwarted. She’s vital and vigorous-minded and eager for experience, but she’s merely marking time and stalling along with what this crazy self-defeating city life has to offer her, with jazz and fox-trotting and overspiced drama and overgeared excitement. She knows it isn’t life, that it’s only the imitation. But it’s all she can get her hands on. She’s even a trifle tired of it, I’d say. For after all there’s nothing drabber than playing a game you’ve really outgrown.”

“And how about Janet?” demanded the grim-jawed father.

“Janet, of course, is more difficult,” acknowledged Peter after a moment of silent thought. “As I remember it, she’s almost three years older than Paddy. She’s a woman now. She’s swung through the whole foolish circle and found there’s mighty little to it. She’s more hard-boiled and yet she’s more of an insurrecto. She’s unsettled and discontented and all at sea. She’s not merely bored, but she’s bored with being bored, if you get what I mean. So she’s doing what most of them do, she’s trying to escape reality by running to queer cults and queer art, by playing about with queer partners and losing herself in queer movements. Yet she’s a——”

“You seem to know a good deal about her,” interrupted the all too embittered Winslow.

“I’ve had my reasons for keeping an eye on Jinny,” acknowledged the man with the salt-and-pepper above his temples. “She’s a wonderful woman, in many ways. And, in another way, she’s an unawakened woman. Frankly, I’m very fond of her. And, to remain equally frank, I’m rather disturbed about her. You see, she comes to me with a good many of her troubles. There’s just one, however, that she’s religiously refrained from mentioning.”

“And that is?” prompted the other, arrested by the prolonging silence of his guest.

“I’m afraid Jinny is rather dangerously interested in a marshmallow artist named Maury. They drift about together a great deal. He’s the type, I suppose, who’d rather appeal to that aborted romantic imagination of hers. But I’m inclined to believe he’s a rotter.”

“Do you mean,” demanded Winslow, “that she’s thinking of marrying this man?”

Peter’s hesitation did not escape him.

“I’m afraid that marriage,” he finally observed, “is a bit beside the mark. The fact is, Maury’s already married, though he and his life-partner don’t seem to be traveling in double harness at the present moment.”

The bigger man, who had fallen to pacing the rug again, stopped short and stood regarding the man in the arm-chair. The eyes in Winslow’s lined and weathered face narrowed ominously.

“So that’s the sort of mess they’re teetering over,” he cried with his uncontrolled grimace of disgust. “Well, if that’s the best your civilization can show for itself, I’m going to yank them out of it.”

Peter remained outwardly calm.

“What can you do?” he inquired, as he dropped his cigarette in the ash-tray.

“I can get them out of this muck,” averred the grim-faced man of action, squaring his shoulders as he glowered down at the bear-head that glowered fraternally back at him, “this muck that’s keeping them soft and smothering the soul out of them. I’m going to throw them back a few centuries and let them find themselves. I’m going to put them back where they can do some honest work or go hungry, where they’ll get down to bed-rock, where they can’t be parasites and piffle their lives away. And I’ll give those lily-white hands of theirs something to do!”

Peter looked up, disturbed by the passion in the older man’s voice. But he refused to become entirely serious.

“Well, look out you don’t kill the lily when you transplant it,” was his offhand reminder as he rose to his feet.

“Oh, I won’t kill ’em,” retorted Winslow. “But I’ll kill some of the poppycock that’s taken root in their empty young heads. I’ll teach them to scratch for themselves the same as I had to scratch for myself. I’ll put them where they’ll have to paddle their own canoe in more ways than one. And I’ll show ’em what their grandmother was up against when she carded her own wool and tanned her own leather and knitted her own stockings and carried her own water and baked her own bread and justified her own existence by actually functioning in her old-fashioned world that wasn’t ashamed of a little honest work. They have the habit of sneering at my hands. They laugh when people call me a go-getter. But it’s only the winners who win out, I’ve noticed. And now, by God, I’m going to give ’em a chance of showing what they’re made of!”

Peter, who had picked up a watch-shaped vanity-case of damascened gold and ivory from the reading-table, stood regarding it studiously and then put it down again.

“How are you going to do it?” he quietly inquired.

“Much simpler than you imagine,” was Winslow’s prompt reply. “I’ve a hunting lodge up on Lake Wapanapi. It’s a good hike up beyond the rail-head. In the middle of Wapanapi is an island called Adanak Island. That’s the island where I tried to breed those Labrador deer twelve years ago and failed. Then I switched to Kamchatka sheep, and failed at that, but I brought over a Scotch Black-face breed that could pull through the Canadian winter with a few months of turnips and hay-feeding. There’s fourteen miles of open water between that island and the mainland. On it there’s a twelve-by-twelve log cabin with two sleeping-bunks and a cooking stove. There’s wood and water and berries enough to run a canning-factory. There’s some open land for growing turnips. And there’s game and fish enough to feed an army, for any one who’s got the brain and gumption to get them. But there aren’t any beauty parlors and padded limousines and saxophone-bands and night-clubs and pink teas and putrid farces. And, thank God, there are no men, no idle and empty-headed men. There’ll just be a bale of blankets and a bag of flour and the other few things our friend the Indian faces life with. And inside of ten days those two girls of mine are going to take a high dive back to Nature. They’re going to be put ashore on that island and find out what life is. And they’re going to stay there until they work out their own salvation.”

Peter, who had been studying Winslow with a non-committal eye, slowly shook his head from side to side.

“It can’t be done, John,” he quietly averred.

“But it’s going to be done,” maintained the russet-faced man on the bear-rug. “When I start a thing, I usually see it through.”

Peter stood quite silent for several moments.

“Anybody else on that island?” he casually inquired.

“There’s no one,” was the prompt response. “No one, that is, except Pierre Pecotte, the old Cree who goes over every month or so to look after what’s left of my sheep. And the only white man who goes near it is a sour-faced young flier named Crowell, Casey Crowell. He fire-ranges over my timber-limits for me in an old seaplane. He used to swing in there sometimes for the lake-trout fishing, but I’ll keep him out of that territory for the rest of the season. And I’ll see that old Pierre doesn’t step into the picture until he’s told to. For when this thing’s done, it’s got to be done right.”

The man of medicine remained thoughtful.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have your troubles,” he finally observed.

“I’ve got them already,” retorted the other. “And now I’m going to see what a little trouble will do for other people.”

“Do you happen to hate your own daughters?” Peter asked after a moment of meditation.

“I don’t hate them; I pity them. It would all be simple enough, if I merely hated them. What I hate is incompetency. I abhor waste; and all this is waste, worse than waste.”

“And this is to be a punishment?” suggested Peter.

“No—it’s medicine,” retorted the other. “It’s like one of your emergency operations.” And he thought of Jinny, as he spoke, as a pantry-mouse who had fallen into a cream-pitcher, who was being smothered in a sort of over-cloying and fatal richness. And, to keep her from drowning in that engulfing soft life, he’d lift her out of it, lift her out by the scruff of the neck, as he’d lift a half-dead mouse out of its imprisoning cream-pitcher.

“I’m inclined to believe,” observed Peter, “that the regenerative influences of the great open spaces have been slightly over-estimated.”

“Life is clean there,” observed Winslow, “and hard.”

“More so than in our cities?”

“In a different way.”

“But the human soul, either above or below the Fifty-Sixth Parallel of Latitude, is still the human soul. And I don’t think geography is the answer to Jinny’s problems. Or Paddy’s either.”

“Then you know exactly what Jinny’s problems are?” challenged Winslow. He spoke with an abruptness that held the other man silent a moment.

“I think,” Peter finally acknowledged, “that I understand Jinny just a trifle better than the rest of you. And I rather think I could manage her just a trifle better than most of you.”

“You don’t seem to have got very far.”

Peter did his best to hide his wince.

“Perhaps I’ve had to plug a little too hard to suit Jinny. It’s a struggle for even a genius to get established in this city. So you can imagine what it’s like with a mere second-rater.”

Winslow’s glance held a touch of impatience. He was not, obviously, a believer in humility.

“They tell me you’re a pretty good surgeon,” he maintained.

“That doesn’t prevent me from being a mighty poor cavalier,” amended the other.

“But why worry about that soft stuff?”

Peter shrugged.

“It’s the soft stuff that seems to make life harder for us,” he casually evaded. “And men, you see, are such chivalric fools. They’re always wanting to make sacrifices for a woman, especially a young and attractive one. Suffering for ’em, in fact, seems to be man’s greatest pleasure.”

“What’s all that got to do with what I’ve been saying?”

“I don’t know, exactly,” answered the patient-eyed Peter. “But I fancy you’re going to find out.”

An incredibly old Indian in a much-patched war-canoe with an outboard motor chugged slowly up to the boat-landing. On his face, withered and seamed like a winter apple, was neither surprise nor interest as he shut off his engine, swung about, and veered in beside the framework of tamarack logs where the two young white women sat regarding him with morose and hostile eyes.

No word was spoken as the canoe was made fast and the bent old figure in the moose-hide shirt and the store-trousers of rusty black creakily mounted the landing. If he noticed that the younger of the two women in the ridiculously thin stockings and short skirts was defiantly smoking her last cigarette he gave no sign of that discovery, just as he betrayed no interest in the fact that the other woman, the one with the tragic and tear-stained face, was still quietly whimpering to herself. But the aquiline old eyes were quick enough in assessing the dunnage that lay piled along the wharf-edge, the hand-bags and blanket-rolls and cases of canned goods and supplies that promised a good load for the war-canoe. And he thoughtfully and silently proceeded to pile the oddly assorted luggage in the bottom of his canoe.

“Where do you suppose this old boneyard came from?” inquired Paddy, as she unconcernedly powdered her nose and inspected her face in a gold-framed vanity-mirror.

Her sister Janet, who sat staring up the narrow bay where the pine-clad headlands repeated themselves in monotonous ridges of misty blue, did not deign to answer that question. Instead, she flung a half-eaten tongue-sandwich, crushed out of shape between her fingers, into the water beside her. And a sob, small but seismic, shook her forlornly relaxed body.

“He’s no war-whooper, that Indian,” proclaimed the younger girl as she tucked away her vanity-case. “Not a feather on him! And that looks like the main-spring of an alarm-clock sewed on his home-made wind-breaker. And please learn from him, Jinny, how calmly it’s possible to accept life.”

But Paddy, getting no response from her self-estranged sister, turned a puckered brow toward Pierre again.

“It’s a pleasant morning in the pulpwood country,” she called blithely out to him.

That salutation, however, remained unanswered. And the girl stood for a moment watching the minnows feeding on what remained of Jinny’s floating sandwich.

“Supposing it can’t speak English?” murmured Paddy as she turned back to the sinewy old figure struggling with the heavy cases. She stopped for a moment to scratch her leg where a mosquito had bitten her. Then she turned again to the old man in the moose-hide shirt.

“Just who are you?” she imperially demanded.

The old Indian placed a wood-ax in the bottom of the canoe before answering.

“Me Pierre Pecotte,” he eventually replied, without so much as a glance at the palefaces.

“And what, kind sir, do you propose doing with our baggage?” inquired the girl in the tiptilted gray turban.

But Pierre, as he proceeded with his task, essayed no answer to that question.

“Do you understand English?” finally demanded Paddy.

She got up suddenly from the case of canned milk on which she had been sitting.

“Me spik good English,” acknowledged the Indian as he transferred the canned-milk case to his canoe.

“Obviously,” said Paddy, with her first sign of a smile, “a regular cataract of English!” But her face grew solemn again. “Where is my father?”

“Him come along Wapanapi soon,” explained Pierre as he solicitously proceeded to shift his freight and trim the fragile-looking craft of birch-bark.

Paddy, crossing to the landing-edge, stared down at the loaded canoe.

“And he expects us to ride in a tub like that?” she demanded.

Pierre declined even to face her.

“You come along him,” he impersonally explained. “She come along me.”

Paddy laughed aloud at that.

“Jinny, you’re to go aqua-planing with this old jackal! Think of that for a new thrill!”

But Janet’s face was grim. She was, obviously, thinking of other things.

“If he wanted to get rid of us,” she said with suppressed passion, “why didn’t he gas us, the same as they do with dogs?”

“We’re not dead yet!” proclaimed Paddy. Her glance about the lonely northern sky-line was a half-defiant one.

“That would have been more honest,” persisted Janet, following her own line of thought, “and also more humane.”

When she rose to her feet and strode moodily to the landing-edge the waiting Indian quietly and impassively possessed himself of the duffel-bag on which she had been seated and placed it in his canoe. But that movement was lost on Janet who, having caught sight of a pair of golf bags in the litter of luggage, pointed at them with an accusatory finger.

“And why did he let us believe we were going on to Banff,” she demanded, “when he knew all the while we were headed for this God-forsaken wilderness?” And Janet, with a vigor quite new to her, slapped at a mosquito that was breakfasting on her arm.

“It wasn’t really Dad who said we were going on to Banff,” Paddy reminded her sister. “That, Old-Timer, was your own private and personal hunch. He merely told us it was none of our business and that he happened to be managing this trip.”

Janet looked about with a smoldering eye.

“Well, we’ll see how it ends when he tries managing me,” was her tight-lipped ultimatum. “I’ve gone about as far as I care to.”

Paddy inspected her with a ruminative eye.

“What’re you going to do?” she indolently inquired.

“You’ll find out when the time comes,” was the cryptic enough retort.

But Paddy gave scant attention to that speech. She was intent, at the moment, on watching a lone paddler in a pointed birch-bark as he rounded the point at the throat of the bay and adroitly headed for the boat-landing. She saw, at a second glance, that it was her father coming back to them, her father in a smoke-stained Mackinaw and frayed corduroy breeches and high-laced hunting-boots. He seemed so much at home in his treacherous-looking craft with its nose high in the air that a frown of thought settled in the girl’s smoothly powdered brow as she contemplated him.

“You know, Jinny,” she said as she crossed to her sister, “Dad may not be so dippy about all this as we imagine! He gets a kick out of this sort of life. He’s learned to kill and cook things. He feels like a Spartan when he rolls up in a blanket and sleeps on a rock. And look at him right now. He’s as proud as a peacock over the way he’s paddling that canoe.”

But Jinny made no reply to that speech. Complete silence reigned on the boat-landing, in fact, as Winslow swung in behind the war-canoe and beached his craft on the lip of sand beside the tamarack-logs. He moved quietly, but his face was set in lines of determination as he climbed thoughtfully up on the landing and contemplated the three silent and motionless figures. All of them, he noticed, sat with averted faces, with no apparent sign of interest in either his arrival or his intentions.

“Pierre, how much will that canoe of yours carry?” he asked with a deliberate matter-of-factness.

“Him carry wan ton, easy,” was the Indian’s stolid-noted reply.

“Got everything aboard?”

“Yum!” And that guttural, obviously, was a word of assent.

“Then, Paddy, you come with me,” said Winslow with a hand-movement toward the smaller craft. “And you,” he added as he turned to his older daughter, “go in the big canoe with Pierre.”

But the woman with the smoldering eyes did not move.

“Get in,” her father quietly commanded.

“I’m not going,” she said with equal quietness. But her glance, as she spoke, met and locked with that of the thick-shouldered man in the soiled Mackinaw.

“You’re only making this harder for yourself,” he said with a patience that was made more impersonal by the manner in which his eye followed his younger daughter as she stepped, teetering like a rope-walker, in the beached canoe.

“I’m not going,” repeated Janet, her face white with something suspiciously like hate. And even in that inapposite moment her father was compelled to admit to himself that there was something persuasive in her imperiousness, in her wayward beauty of line and coloring. But he was tempted, at that particular moment, to resent her very attractiveness. It seemed subversive and disarming and a threat to the question at issue.

“What do you propose doing?” he demanded. “Staying here and starving?”

“I’m not going to get in that boat,” proclaimed the sullen-eyed young woman, ignoring the blackfly so insolently singing about her face.

“Do you know how long you’ll last out here, without food and shelter?” the man in the Mackinaw demanded of her. “This isn’t the Ritz tea-room you’re up against now. It’s reality.”

“It’s insanity,” proclaimed Janet as she swung about on him. “It’s insanity—the whole thing!”

“On the contrary,” said the patient-eyed man confronting her, “it’s a struggle back toward sanity.”

“I’m not going,” said the girl with the singularly white hands.

“You are,” said Winslow, unbuttoning his Mackinaw.

“I’m not,” repeated Janet, backing away from the threat in his eyes.

It was the voice of Paddy, from the smaller canoe, that broke in on that duel of silently contending glances.

“Oh, for the luva Pete, Jinny, what’s the good of grousing on the gangplank! If we’re booked for the great open spaces we may as well get aboard!”

“She’s going to,” proclaimed Winslow. For he was already aware of the gush of tears that had come to Janet’s eyes, tears of frustration and helplessness touched with passion. “Start your engine, Pierre.”

Yet Winslow’s movements were betrayingly gentle as he led the tear-blinded girl to the landing-edge. He even swallowed once or twice as he made clumsily solicitous efforts to nest her more comfortably amid the duffel on the canoe-bottom. And he pretended not to hear her half-strangled protest that she didn’t propose to be dumped in his damned old lake as though she were so much fish-spawn.

“Take it easy, Pierre, so that I can keep up with you,” commanded Winslow as he reached for his paddle and pushed off. And almost side by side the two canoes floated up the narrow bay with the amber-tinted water flashing silver in the June sunlight and surface-ripples tattooing musically against the taut thin shells of their birch-bark.

“Why don’t you let your old Indian tow us?” Paddy suddenly inquired. She had been staring lazily at the outboard motor kicking its way through the water a little ahead of them.

“I don’t care to be towed by anybody,” was Winslow’s abrupt-noted reply.

“Of course,” agreed the faintly smiling girl. “But aren’t you making yourself a lot of trouble?”

“A little honest work is good for us all,” answered the man in the smoke-stained Mackinaw. He resented, from a person so young and pallid, that vaguely derisive tone which could so exasperatingly elude open attack. “Don’t you think I’m strong enough to stand it?” he demanded as he threw an additional new weight into his measured strokes.

“There seem to be so many different ways of being strong,” was the altogether unexpected retort from the prismatic-tinted young lady in the canoe-bow.

And that, apparently, gave her broad-shouldered parent a good deal to think about, for there was little further talk between them as they pursued their way along the ripple-singing water bordered with its translucent green shadows.

But the paddle-strokes never stopped. That small rhythm of sound and movement, in fact, became almost narcotic as they circled out into a wider body of water that narrowed again into a strait studded with conical green islands. They crossed a small lake that merged imperceptibly into a twisting and winding bayou weaving its mysterious way through marshlands, where from time to time no opening showed itself to the untrained eye. Then a gasp escaped Paddy’s lips as they rounded a bolder headland, for confronting her in the clear northern light she beheld a wide-nosed moose knee-deep in the shallows. But she sniffed deeper as she became conscious, for the first time, of the smell of balsam on the air. The white birches along the bank, she noticed, looked as slender as dryads. And when a loon laughed, out in the deeper waters, she found something amusing in the sound. But her face hardened again as she stared northward into the lonely vista of the pinelands, where tier by tier the blue-misted hills and valleys repeated themselves in endless succession. It was the light, she assumed, that made her eyelids heavy. And it was the never-ending ripple of the water against their bow, she also assumed, that brought a faint lethargy of relaxation to her febrile young soul and made it hard for her to keep from slumping indolently back against the canoe-thwart.

“Feel any better?” Winslow curtly inquired as he noticed the telltale droop of her head. He was paddling steadily and determinedly and his face was wet with sweat. But about that face hovered a vague aura of exaltation.

“Not a bit,” retorted Paddy. And she maneuvered a frown that bore every aspect of a fixed hostility.

“You will,” proclaimed her father as he fell to paddling again.

“Should you be working as hard as you’re doing?” she ventured to ask out of the silence that had once more fallen between them. Her solicitude, he could see, was not without its muffled touch of scorn.

“It’ll do me good,” he observed with an enforced heartiness. “It will harden me up a bit. And, as I said before, that doesn’t hurt anybody.”

“It won’t blister your hands?” she ventured with paraded concern.

“They’ve been hardened by honest work,” he reminded her as he shifted his position in the canoe-bottom and still again threw an added vim into his strokes. For by this time they had debouched from an island-freckled estuary into the open water of Lake Wapanapi, with a gentle land-swell rocking them along as they quartered westward toward what was obviously Adanak Island.

Paddy made a pretense of no vast interest in that island as it lay before her, low and blue-misted along the horizon. But as the steady paddle-strokes brought them nearer and nearer the mottled green valleys and the black-fringed hills under a high-arching sky of robin-egg blue she essayed more than one covert glance at the rock-fringed bays, at the receding inlets framed in pebbly white beaches between the ever-diminishing cliff-points where pineland and water met.

Her face hardened, however, when she noticed her father’s slightly saturnine eye fixed on her.

“You know, Dad,” she said out of the silence, “this is a pretty rotten deal you’re giving us.”

“What do you know about it?” he demanded with unexpected savagery. He was, obviously, bracing himself for certain ordeals of his own. For she looked disturbingly small and frail and feminine against that background of empty woodland threaded with its empty waterways.

“I don’t know anything about it,” asserted Paddy. “And that’s why it seems rather like a newfangled way of walking the plank.”

Winslow, as he paddled stubbornly on, stared at the deep-loaded canoe ahead of them.

“That high-spirited sister of yours has talked considerably about starting out on her own hook,” he said, as he dipped and redipped his paddle-blade in the sun-burnished water. “Well, I’m starting her—starting both of you. You’re going to face the business of feeding and clothing yourselves, of keeping yourselves alive with your own hands. And maybe they won’t be so lily-white, a couple of weeks from now!”

And, having spoken, he stopped paddling, staring at her with an air of carefully fabricated wrath.

Paddy, instead of answering him, looked studiously down at her hands. Then, with what seemed a shoulder-movement of disdain, she opened her vanity-case and proceeded to powder her nose.

That movement, trivial as it was, seemed symbolic to the man in the canoe-stern. It reiterated the girl’s preoccupation with petty personal adornment, her generation’s placid over-emphasis on the accidental and the decorative. And it gave him, at a time when he most needed it, a new resoluteness.

“The day will come when you’ll thank me for this,” he said as he resumed his paddling.

“Will Jinny?”

Winslow paddled with renewed vigor.

“She’ll learn to knuckle down.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

“She’ll find out that everything comes at a price.”

Paddy gazed at the broken shore-line in front of them.

“I don’t see,” she ventured, “how jack-pine and juniper are going to change her much.”

And Jinny, herself, as she sat in the bigger canoe with the impassive Pierre, must have been thinking very much the same thoughts. For as she drifted closer to the blue-ridged island before her she studied with an increasingly clouded eye the lonely shadows of its shore-line. To do this, however, she was compelled to twist about, from time to time, and peer over her shoulder, since she sat with her back to the canoe-bow, facing the old Indian with the steering paddle in his hand. She even found it necessary, as she shifted her position, to move a little to one side the ax which lay almost under her in the canoe-bottom.

But as Pierre once more shut off his motor, to permit the smaller canoe to catch up with them again, she stopped short in her inspection of that bright-bladed ax and lifted her eyes to the bronzed and withered old face of the Indian. It impressed her as a barricaded and singularly remote face, as vaguely animal-like and inaccessible, as divorced from her and her world by countless centuries of time. But as the canoe lost headway and veered a trifle from its course she turned and studied with an equal intentness the blue-shadowed and broken shore-line of Adanak Island. A faint shudder passed through her cramped body. Then, as she took a deeper breath, her eyes suddenly hardened.

“You said you understood English?” she demanded of the silent figure in the boat stern.

“Yum,” came in a retarded grunt from the motionless Pierre.

“Then understand this,” his white-faced passenger said with studied precision. “I don’t want to go any farther. I want you to turn back.”

Pierre made no response to that command. Nor did any change show in a line of the withered old face.

“I want you to turn back,” repeated the girl in a voice both louder and lower-pitched. If the narrow-eyed Pierre noticed the white fingers that reached out for the ax-handle he gave no evidence of what he had seen.

“Turn back,” commanded the girl with the ax in her hand. “Do you hear me? Turn back, or I’ll sink this through your hull.”

Pierre remained immovable. No emotion showed on his face. Nor did he move as the girl beyond the dunnage-pile braced herself and lifted the ax-head high in the air.

“Turn back,” she repeated.

This time there was a shriller note in her voice. But Pierre, glimpsing the smaller canoe over his shoulder, merely stooped down and started his engine. And as the small bronze propeller once more threshed the lake-water it was plain that he was heading straight for the island.

A gasp of something more than anger escaped Janet’s lips. In it were defiance and self-pity and the quick-blooded recklessness of final issues forgotten. When she struck, she struck with all the strength at her command. She sank the heavy ax-head through the trivial thin ribs of swamp-elm and the flimsy tissue of gum-smeared birch-bark, staring at the open wound where the dark lake-water bubbled up about her feet.

The craft was heavily loaded and the water boiled up into it with incredible quickness. But the outboard motor remained running until the bow, sinking low, lifted the bronze screw clear of the lake surface.

Paddy, from the smaller canoe close behind them, watched with a widening eye the strange maneuvers of that unstable larger craft. She saw it diminish fantastically along the water-line. She saw it lurch and go down, bow first, with the two oddly intent figures still leaning against its thwarts. She saw it vanish as though a Gargantuan mouth had opened and swallowed it up.

A cry, throaty with terror, broke from her as she rose unsteadily to her feet.

“They’ve sunk,” she shouted as she kicked off her inadequate suede slippers. “They’ve sunk there, and Jinny can’t swim ten yards.”

Jinny, in fact, didn’t seem to be swimming at all. She was floundering and strangling between a floating blanket-roll and an abandoned paddle as Pierre, for reasons all his own, struck stolidly out for the shore. She was gurgling and gasping for help, clutching for something to hold her up where the bottom had fallen out of her world, where the engulfing water was denying her the ever attenuating right to breathe.

Paddy, in that emergency, lost no time in hesitation. She heard her father’s quick cry to wait, as he swung the canoe about, but she disregarded it. She dived headlong from the narrow thwart. She dived promptly, reckless of consequences, no more conscious of the fact that she had overturned the canoe in her leap than she was conscious of the coldness of the water.

It was not until she had her fingers clutched in Janet’s matted short hair and was holding the drooling mouth well above the water-line that she became aware of her father’s struggles, close behind her, as he fought to balance the overturned canoe and hold it bottom-up with enough air belled in its body to keep them all afloat. He called to them to hold steady and directed the half-submerged keel-ridge between them, showing them how to hang saddle-wise over the boat-bottom as he balanced their perilous float and slowly propelled it toward shore.

By the time Pierre had waded out to receive them Paddy was no longer swearing softly to herself and Janet was no longer coughing and gasping. An odd silence fell over them as they felt gravel under their feet and stumbled ashore and sank down on a sloping floor of lichened rock meagerly warmed by the noonday sun.

Winslow did his best to keep his teeth from chattering as Pierre, still stolidly deliberate in his movements, swam out and salvaged his paddle and then the blanket-roll that floated beside it. Then the owner of the island turned and looked at his daughters, sitting limp and wet and helpless on their wide shelf of rock. And he forgot his own sodden clothes in the wave of disquiet, and something more than disquiet, which swept through him at the sudden thought of their helplessness, of their sheer feminine inadequacy before the forces of nature.

“Well, you haven’t made it any easier for yourselves,” he said with self-defensive bruskness as he rose heavily to his feet and took off his water-soaked Mackinaw. He wrung it out as best he could and laid it flat on the sun-steeped rock.

He sat watching it for another moment of silence and then turned and studied Pierre as the latter slowly unlaced the waterproof covering about the blanket-roll and shook out the fleecy Hudson Bay four-pointers. The Indian, he noticed, had taken his hunting-knife from his belt and from the center of two blankets was cutting in each a round hole almost a foot in diameter.

“All same squaw,” he muttered as he placed the two blankets between the wet and shivering white women.

It was then, and then only, that Winslow understood. His daughters would have to wear that ample covering of wool until the water-soaked finery that once adorned them had been dried out by fire or sun. Each would have to put her imperious young head through a hole in a blanket, and find cover and warmth in that primitive garment, as her betters had done before her. They had made their nest, and now they could lie in it.

“This is some jamb!” he heard Paddy say through chattering teeth.

“It is,” promptly agreed her father.

“A regular bedtime story for the bunny rabbits,” mocked the morose-eyed girl, as she started pulling off her wet stockings.

“For which you have only yourselves to thank,” averred Winslow as he remembered how all their paraphernalia of civilization had gone to the lake-bottom with the war-canoe. They had flung themselves a trifle farther back along the trail of time than he had intended. But even that, in the end, would not prove altogether contrary to his intentions.

“You’d better go into the bushes there and get those wet clothes off,” he proclaimed. He even plumed himself on the stoic unconcern with which he said it.

“And then what?” demanded Paddy, whose moist hand had been rather hungrily investigating the softness of the big four-point blanket.

“Then Pierre will show you where your cabin is,” was her father’s studiously impersonal retort. “And what you do after that is entirely your own affair. For here is where I fade out of the picture.”

Janet, as she rose slowly to her feet, turned and inspected him with an eye of glacial coldness.

“I think,” she said with the utmost deliberation, “that you have gone completely crazy.”

Winslow’s laugh was a mirthless one.

“Then we’ll see who gets back to sanity first,” he proclaimed, as he motioned the old Indian to his side. “Pierre, show them what they need to know about that camp. Show them—but see that it ends there. I’ll come back and pick you up at the Point here in three hours. In three hours, remember, I’ll be here with the canoe. Is that clear?”

“Yum,” assented Pierre.

But when, later in the afternoon, Winslow met the old Indian under the lee of the Point and digested the latter’s brief report of how the two paleface women had been installed in the little cabin between the hills, the anxious-eyed white man hesitated about leaving Adanak Island. He changed his plan, in fact, to the extent of retreating to a secluded bay between the jack-pines and there building a fire and dining on the meager bacon and bannock which Pierre had smuggled out to him. And when the shadows of evening had deepened into the darkness of night the still anxious-eyed father, under cover of that darkness, guardedly picked his way through the broken hillsides and the still ghostlier pinelands until he came in sight of the lonely little cabin of spruce logs in its nestling hollow of verdure.

No sound came from within and no light showed from the small window. So he worked his way through the underbrush and crept as quietly as he could still nearer the silent cabin. He moved a trifle stiffly, for his immersion that day had brought a touch of creakiness to his knee-joints. He remembered, as he stood there in frowning perplexity, that a man of his age couldn’t go around in wet clothes for three hours without finally paying for it. When, in fact, he was on the point of picking his way still closer to the wall of the silent wickiup, his body was shaken by a loud and resonant sneeze.

He was startled, a moment later, by a second equally abrupt sound, by the sudden report of a shotgun and a flash of fire from the near-by window-square in the spruce logs. As he turned about, intent on seeking shelter, still another report brought a charge of duck-shot singing uncomfortably close over his head.

He no longer hesitated. He retreated without either dignity or loss of time to the deeper shadow of the woodland. There, leaning against a sheltering spruce tree to regain his breath, he gazed somewhat ruefully back toward the hunting-lodge that held his embattled daughters.

“They’ll do!” was his mutter of quiet conviction as he turned and groped his way stumblingly out through the tangle of underbrush. As he deciphered a tortuous path back to the lake-shore where Pierre awaited him he heard a growl of thunder from the west.

“Um bad weather t’-morrow,” proclaimed the old Indian.

And when, seven hours later, Pierre paddled him back to the lower boat-landing it was raining thinly but steadily. Shore-lines, in that thick weather, looked both desolate and indistinct. But when Winslow finally made out the tamarack crib he was surprised to see young Drake, his secretary, awaiting him in the uncertain gray light of that rainswept morning.

“I’ve had quite a time getting to you, sir,” said the bespectacled young man in the raincoat.

“What’s wrong?” demanded Winslow.

But Drake had to wait until the pulpwood king had finished his fit of sneezing.

“The Coldwater dam broke yesterday and we stand a chance of losing seven million logs.”

There was a silence of ten full seconds.

“Can we get out to-morrow?” asked Winslow.

“Yes, sir, by making a night hike and having a gas-engine run us down to the main line in the afternoon. That would give us time to have the Eastern Limited flagged at Pickerel Falls.”

Winslow tucked away his handkerchief.

“Good,” he said, ready to clamber out of the canoe. “I’ll dictate the telegrams on the way down. And remember, Pierre,” he added as he turned back to the bronze-faced old figure in the canoe, “you’re to keep an eye on those girls of mine. Don’t make things too easy for them. I can’t say I want ’em to starve, of course. But keep your distance and tell ’em nothing. You understand?”

Pierre removed the antique black pipe from his withered mouth.

“All same squaw,” he repeated as he steadied the canoe for the heavy-bodied man to step ashore.

Paddy, instead of waking up in an Italian bed of ivory and gold with a mother-of-pearl call-bell at her elbow, woke up in a narrow wall-bunk wrapped in a Hudson Bay four-point blanket that smelled slightly of kerosene and yellow soap. She could hear the steady beat of rain on the roof and the slow dispiriting drip of water where some of the rain was forcing its way through the roof-slabs and weeping a puddle beside the rusty sheet-iron stove.

The air, Paddy noticed, smelled cold and damp and musty. Mixed up with its mustiness was an antique odor of tobacco, of very bad tobacco shot through with still another odor, the slightly dusty odor of pine-needles. And the sound of the rain on the roof was very monotonous. She wondered, indolently, why she wasn’t lying in her own silk-draped bed with the intertwined Correggio Cupids carved on its lacquered head-board. She wondered why her matutinal cut flowers and her little silver-plated cradle-phone weren’t at her side. She even foggily debated as to what had become of her Dolphin glass reading-lamp with its rose-lined oblong shade and the little imitation golf-bag of chased gold that used to hold her morning cigarette. She wondered why her bones felt heavy, and why the mattress under her tired body seemed so hard, and why the thought of hot coffee with clotted cream left her with a slightly disappointed feeling somewhere between her floating ribs. And then she forgot to wonder. She merely let the dripping water lull her back to sleep.

It wasn’t until a mosquito bit her on the nose that she actually and unequivocally opened her eyes. She must have been entirely awake by this time, for she stared perplexedly, yet alertly, about the rough log walls that enclosed her and let her eyes come to a rest on the two duck-guns that lay there across their absurd wall-hooks of buck-horns. Then her gaze wandered on to the shack-stove and the grub-box behind it and the rough wall-bunk on the opposite side of the narrow room and the scorched line of variegated thin garments of silk and serge that looked so dolorously like a baked Alaska that had been put through a clothes-wringer.

And then memory returned to its throne. That line of scorched apparel, she recalled, was all that was left of the saturated city clothes which they had draped so abandonedly close about the hot stove the night before. And there was about enough of them left, she saw, to dust a flute.

Then Paddy sat up with a start, perplexed by the discovery that the second wall-bunk, which most assuredly should have held her sister Jinny, stood disordered and empty.

But her resultant feeling of solitude shot through with alarm died away as quickly as it had come into being. For as she turned about she caught sight of a silhouetted figure sitting thoughtful and motionless on the rough pine sill of the open shack-door. It was Jinny. She was sitting with her draping gray blanket held close about her waist by a darkened thong of buckskin knotted over one hip. She sat leaning against the rough door-frame, staring out over a desolate expanse of lake-water, slate-gray in the driving rain. And when she tired of looking at the rainswept water she stared impassively and meditatively down at her own hands. Her sigh, when she finally looked up, was a wordlessly dejected one. It was so dejected that Paddy was prompted to call out to her.

“What’s wrong?” asked the girl on the bunk. She did her best to force a note of cheeriness into that question. But its casualness rang hollow.

Janet turned slowly and regarded her with a lack-luster eye.

“The fire’s out,” she tragically reminded her sister.

That brought Paddy abruptly out of her bunk. She stared at the rusty sheet-iron stove, felt it and found it cold, lifted a lid and saw nothing but a bed of ashes.

“Aren’t there matches?” demanded Paddy as she walked helplessly about the stove. Such things, she remembered from the day before, were lighted with shavings and dry bark and small pieces of wood. She had seen old Pierre doing it—and it had impressed her as a much clumsier way of obtaining heat than by the turning of a nickel-plated switch beside an electric-grill.

“Not one,” Jinny dolorously answered.

“Are you sure?” asked Paddy, fighting down a shiver of revulsion as she draped herself in the barbaric gray blanket with a hole in its center.

“No; there’s no matches, and no fire, and no dry wood even. Fires, apparently, have to be kept burning, or they go out. And we were too dumb to keep it going. We were too dumb to carry dry wood into the shack. And I wish you’d have let me drown in that cursed lake out there.”

Her face, in the vague side-light, looked disturbingly drawn and pallid.

“We’ve got to have fire,” proclaimed Paddy, as she gathered up the scorched finery and tossed it into a corner. She stood before the stove, staring down at its solemn and taciturn bulk. It had seemed a very consoling and cheery thing, the night before, with the old copper kettle singing on its top and the rose glow behind its open throat.

“Everything’s wet,” complained Jinny. Paddy, for the first time, saw the suspicion of a beaten look in her sister’s eyes. “And I’m going back to bed.”

“What good will that do?”

Jinny failed to resent the sharpened note.

“What good will anything do?” was her listless counter-challenge.

Paddy felt very far away from a world that had abandoned and betrayed her. But she was not yet ready to give up.

“We’ll have to wait until Pierre comes,” she announced, conscious, for the first time, of the reviving sharp call of hunger in her clamorous young body. And her spirits fell, in spite of herself, as she stood watching her sister creep back into the wall-bunk and cover her narrow body with the engulfing blankets. It made her think of a mummy going back into its sarcophagus. It reminded her of a human shell, in which the flame of life had died, turning its back on the world.

Paddy, with her jaw shut tight, walked slowly about the stove. She wondered how one got fire in a fireless world. Old Pierre, the day before, had certainly performed that miracle, but she had not been sufficiently interested, at the time, to study his method of procedure. And there could be occasions, she saw, when it was worth while being able to do things, to do things with one’s own hands.

But wanting a thing didn’t bring it. And she wanted fire. She had a vague idea of aboriginal people using flint and steel, but just how they used it was beyond her knowledge. She had an equally misty memory of the ancient Greeks or the Romans, or some other old-timers one read about in history, always keeping a flame burning on one of their temple altars, always tending one little core of heat, like a tribal cigarette-lighter that was never permitted to go out.

“We’ll have to do that,” she said aloud and quite solemnly, “once we get this thing going.”

She prowled and padded about, still nursing the hope of finding one last match. But her search was fruitless. She stared out in the driving rain, as though half-expecting some distant sign of smoke through the dripping underbrush. Then, in her dilemma, she opened the stove door and raked with interrogative thin fingers through the bed of ashes.

She found, to her surprise, that there was still warmth in their lower layers. And then a sudden cry of relief broke from her lips, for deep in that blanketing gray bed she found one oblong coal of living fire. It was bright, as bright as a ruby, and she could feel the precious heat of it against her shielding palm. But it grew dimmer, she noticed, even as she stared down at it. And the soul of it, the precious and fleeting inner life of it, must in some way be saved.

She restored it to its ash-bed and ran bare-ankled about the shack, looking for a scrap of paper, for a dry shred or two of bark, for anything that would sustain that small cat’s-eye of incandescence. She even ran out into the driving rain, where she grubbed under wet logs and sodden chip-piles for anything that was dry. She dug frantically and rather foolishly, until her hands were muddy and her hair was wet.

All she could salvage, however, was a palmful of pine-needles and a dry leaf or two. And she ran with these back to the open hearth, where she still found one tiny core of life. It struck her, while she knelt there, as oddly symbolic of their own predicament, of their own impending struggle to keep life going, to preserve one point of warmth in an unfriendly wilderness. It was emblematic of some wider issue, she told herself as her tremulous fingers piled the pine-needles close about that diminishing small ruby of life. She saw, as she blew on it, one thin thread of smoke ascending from the diminutive pyre in the ash-bed. She blew harder, only to see it die out, dolorously. She stirred the needles cautiously and fanned them with a steadier breath. She blew on them until she was tired. But no second thread of smoke went up from them.

“It’s out,” she gasped with a small and tragic shiver. And this was true. For when she looked for her coal she found only ashes.

She sat down on her bunk-bed, listening to the beat of the rain on the roof, staring out at the dripping brushwood and the gray waste of water beyond it.

She sat there until she remembered that she was hungry. That brought back to her mind the package wrapped in birch-bark which she had kicked carelessly aside from their wet door-step. She rescued it from the rain and untied it. What it held was apparently food, but it was unlike food she had ever seen before. Some of it was smoked moose-meat, dry and stringy and incredibly tough. And some of it was roughly shaped bannock, gray-fibered and hard and scorched about the edges.

Yes, it was apparently food, Paddy decided as she gnawed at one end of the ash-stained bannock. It was obviously meant to eat, she maintained as she tried to sink her teeth in the tough and pungent-smelling meat. But she put it aside, with a grimace of disgust, and looked dejectedly about until her eye fell on an empty and rust-browned marmalade tin. This she took in her hands and, gathering her blanket closer about her, picked her way down to the lake-shore. The pebbles and stones hurt her feet and she slipped once, muttering a blasphemous word as she gathered herself up again. She wondered, as she dipped up a half-measure of the lake-water, if it was fit for a human being to drink. It was probably polluted, but she didn’t much care. She was thirsty and she intended to drink it.

She found, as she satisfied her thirst, that it tasted much better than she had expected. She was even prompted to carry a tin-full of it back to the shack, where Jinny, with her face turned to the wall, gave every evidence of being asleep. So Paddy, left to her own devices, once more directed her attention to the bannock and moose-meat. She chewed on it industriously, for a minute or two, swallowed a little of it, and sat regarding the unsavory stuff, sat regarding it with a morose and smoldering eye. Then, in a sudden flash of anger, she caught it up and flung it out through the still open shack door.

“I’m no Indian,” she said aloud.

But a new meekness must have crept into her spirit, for half an hour later she ventured out in the driving rain and gathered up the scattered bannock and moose-meat and carried it frowningly back into the shack. There, feeling chilly under her damp blanket, she stared irresolutely at the empty wall-bunk, listened for a moment to the dolorous drip from the roof-leak, and crawled dispiritedly into the narrow sleeping-berth.

“Damn the rain,” she said as she lay watching the gray waste of water through the open shack door.

Paddy awakened, the second morning, with the sunlight from the open shack door falling obliquely across her face and the already familiar smell of pine-needles filling the air. It was not an unpleasant smell, on the whole. It was as thinly pleasurable as the sound of rippling water that came ever so faintly to her drowsy ears. And mixed up with it, in some indecipherable way, was a sense of deliverance which she made no conscious effort, at first, to analyze.

It wasn’t until she sat up and stared out at a sparkling and vivid-colored world, a world washed clean after rain, an alert and light-mirroring and leaf-rustling world, that she realized exactly where and what she was. She saw a red squirrel look in at the door, pert and companionable, and caught the repeated song of a white-throated sparrow from the birch-grove toward the lake. That not unpleasant smell of pine-needles, she discovered, came from the camp-pillow at the head of her bunk. She could see Jinny, under her gray blankets, with her face still turned toward the wall. And some suggestion of suspended animation about the other awakened a prompt spirit of opposition in Paddy.

“Are you awake, Jinny?” she called out.

“Yes,” answered the other, without so much as turning her head.

Paddy subsided on her bunk, feeling more than ever alone in the world. They weren’t, she felt, facing this thing in the right spirit. They weren’t swallowing their medicine. And it was no time to show a yellow streak.

All they wanted was a start, and then things would be bound to right themselves. A little fire and a little food, and then they could study their problem and see where they were. Dumbness, plain, every-day dumbness—that was the thing they must guard against. They had forgotten to use their brains, and their fire had gone out, for lack of wood. They had forgotten to look beyond their own unpowdered noses, and they had paid for it by a day of misery.

Paddy’s ruminative eye wandered about the shack walls and came to a rest on the two grease-covered duck-guns resting across their buck-antler pegs. They had made a prodigious roar, she remembered, when she had shot at that prowling animal in the bushes. She had seen the stab of flame in the dark. It would have frightened away an elephant.

“That stab of flame,” she repeated aloud as she suddenly sat up on her bunk. And flame meant fire, and fire meant warmth and shelter and food.

“No brains!” she shouted aloud. “That’s what’s the matter with us—simply no brains!”

She knotted the loose blanket about her waist and stepped out through the open door. It felt warm and comfortable and reassuring in the flooding yellow sunlight. But she wanted a different sort of warmth, a tamed and tractable warmth, a warmth under a singing copper kettle and a frying-pan with a fish on it.

She pioneered hurriedly about, peeling dry bark from the silvery birch boles, breaking dead twigs from the underbrush, gathering dry sticks from the outer circle of their dooryard.

“I’ve got it, Jinny,” she cried as she carried these in to the rusty stove-hearth.

“Got what?” asked the listless-eyed Jinny.

“A fire,” answered Paddy as she reached tremulously up for the duck-gun. She looked squintingly about and then picked up the camp-pillow of worn pilot-cloth and dried pine-needles. This she placed on the ground, just outside the open door. Then she took the duck-gun, and held the barrel-end close to the pilot-cloth and pulled the trigger.

The powder-blast of that shot, at such close range, promptly fired the cloth. She flung herself down on the shattered pillow, blowing on the smoking cloth, fanning it with her breath until the creeping glow extended to the pine-needles and a thin column of smoke curled up in the air.

“I’ve got it,” repeated Paddy as a bright and narrow flame broke out like a flag of victory. It grew in volume as she fed the smoldering pile with her little shreds of bark, with her delicately poised splinters of pine, with the heavier twigs in which the resinous sap began to sing like an imprisoned bee.

Then she ran in for a crockery plate and with it scooped up a handful of the burning mass and carried it to the opened stove, where she piled more sticks and shouted for Jinny to run and bring fresh fuel, bark, chips, branches, anything that would burn. And when a flame broke out, when an open and unequivocal flame of actual fire danced rose-colored above the darker mass of fuel, an answering light of triumph flowered in the girl’s intently watching eyes.

“We’ve got it,” she proclaimed still again as she took the heavier sticks that Jinny was handing her and piled them over that essential core of heat. “All we need now is wood enough.”

“And something to eat,” said Jinny. “I’m hollow inside.”

That took Paddy’s appraising eye once more about the cabin. Life, of a sudden, seemed very simple and very rudimentary to the hungry girl in the gray blanket-robe.

“Where’s that dried bull-meat?” she inquired, momentarily puzzled. “And those cast-iron biscuits of Pierre’s?”

“I ate ’em,” admitted Jinny, evading her eye.

Paddy stood silent a moment.

“People, naturally, have to eat,” she conceded. “So I guess the next thing for us to do is take stock. There must be something here.”

So they proceeded, with wide-eyed preoccupation, to assess the cabin’s contents. From under the dish-shelf behind the stove they drew out the shabby grub-box, lined with zinc. From its musty interior they disinterred a withered and green-molded half-side of bacon, a half-sack of leathery-looking dried apples, a bag of flour into which field-mice had at some time burrowed, a tobacco-box filled with rusty salt, a cheese-firkin holding a couple of pecks of white beans and a sack of corn-meal with weevil-webs in it.

“Could we eat it?” asked Jinny, sniffing at the rancid bacon-side. She found it hard, as she spoke, to keep her voice from shaking.

“They slice it and fry it,” proclaimed Paddy with a frown of sagacity. “It’s breakfast bacon.”

“We’d have to scrape it and wash it first,” pursued Jinny. But Paddy, apparently, failed to hear her. Her explorative eye was wandering over the narrow shack, where she noticed the scant crockery dishes, the battered copper kettle, the skillet and boiling-pot, the rough deal table with its three home-made stools, the litter of fishing-tackle above the gun-pegs, and a wooden water-pail in which stood an ax with a broken handle.

“Couldn’t we cook some of this stuff?” asked Jinny as she lifted the meal-sack out on the table-end.

“I suppose it has to be boiled,” ventured Paddy as she inspected the iron pot on the stove back. She did the best she could to keep the choke from her voice. But she felt very helpless as she sat down on one of the three-legged stools and let her gaze rest on the empty table.

“The next thing we’ve got to have then is water,” asserted Jinny, trying in vain to keep a tremolo of helplessness from her voice.

Paddy sat silent a moment, with her own lips compressed.

“The one thing we’ve got to have,” she maintained with sudden vigor, “is grit. Just plain grit, Jinny! We may not be high steppers at this Robinson Crusoe game, and I don’t know how long we’re here for, but we’re going to get away with it. We’ve got to!”

Jinny’s eye remained a morose one as she stared out over the lake-water and the faint blue line of hills beyond it.

“I don’t want to be a squawker,” she finally admitted. “And we’d have had proper food, I suppose, if I hadn’t been such a fool. I want to make up for that. But what’s the use of trying to force a grin when you’re so hungry it leaves you weak in the knees?”

Never before in all her life, she remembered, had she stood face to face with the bald menace of hunger. Never before had she found herself where the touch of a bell or a word to a maid would not have brought her immediate relief. But overnight, almost, that old world had vanished. And now she was staring rather wistfully down at a sack of weevil-tainted corn-meal, even wondering if the musty yellow grits could possibly be eaten raw. Those meditations, however, were interrupted by a small shout from Paddy, who was leaning over the grub-box.

“It’s tea,” she cried. “I’ve found some tea.” And she triumphantly paraded a crumpled lead-leaf carton still holding an ounce or two of powdered tea-leaves. It was the one thing comprehensible to their urban eyes, a ghostly reminder of other days, an emblem of well-being.

“And now we’ll eat proper,” affirmed Paddy as she took up the wooden pail and picked a guarded path to the lake-edge for water.

When, an hour later, old Pierre appeared unexpectedly on the scene, he encountered two young white women crouched gnome-like on log slabs, munching the last of their over-cooked bacon-slices and eating lumpy corn-mush fried in a shallow river of fat. There was grease on their unwashed hands and smoke-stains on their untanned young faces. But an odd look of contentment crept into their grimly concentrated faces as they refilled their crockery cups from the battered copper tea-pail and voluptuously sipped the last of that still hot and amber-tinted liquid.

It was then and then only that Paddy turned a none too friendly glance in the direction of the silent Indian.

“Did you bring us food?” she demanded as she wiped her mouth on one corner of her blanket.

“Plenty grub here all time,” proclaimed the impassive Pierre.

Paddy regarded him with a hostile eye.

“You call that plenty?” she challenged, pointing toward the still open grub-box.

Pierre’s deep-set eyes remained impassive.

“That lake him plenty full good fish,” he quietly explained.

“And how do we get them?” challenged the younger girl.

“Catch um,” replied Pierre. “And pit out there plenty full good turnips.”

“Turnips!” cried Paddy. “Why, turnips aren’t——”

But Jinny silenced her with a glance. She even smiled understandingly up at the old Indian.

“Pierre,” she affirmed, “you are simply wonderful. I don’t know what we’d do without you.”

Pierre’s reply to this was suspiciously like a grunt.

“You are going to help us in so many ways,” pursued the dulcet-voiced Janet. “You know all about this sort of life and just what to do. That means we’ll have to depend on you, depend on you tremendously. You understand that, of course?”

If Pierre understood, he gave no audible evidence of the same.

“In the first place,” went on the softly smiling Jinny, “are you to stay with us here?”

“Me no can stay on island,” averred Pierre.

“But you’ll stay near us,” prompted the young white woman. “You’ll stay close by over the water so you come help us plenty?” she amplified in unconscious imitation of her tutor’s tongue.

“Yum,” affirmed Pierre.

“You see, Pierre,” continued the even-voiced young white woman with the mournful and star-like eyes, “there’s so many things we seem to be in need of. But you are a heap clever chief, I know. I imagine there’s no more clever chief in all these north woods. Am I not right, Paddy?”

“Heap plenty all right,” solemnly assented the younger girl. But her smile was a sardonic one.

“Now, in the matter of things to eat, Pierre,” suggested the bland-eyed Janet. “Fish and turnips are all right in their way, but——”

“Sheep back in hills,” announced the old Indian.

“And how are we to get them?” inquired Jinny.

“Kill um.”

“Of course,” agreed the cogitating girl. “And how are we to get the other things?”

“Me mebbe bring deer by-um-bye.”

“That will be nice. A great hunter, of course, could always get deer. But there’s also the question of clothes, you see. The rough ground hurts our feet and we need shoes.”

“Me show um how make Indian moccasin,” agreed Pierre.

“Good,” assented Jinny, turning the light of her smile on the wrinkled old face with the deep-set eyes. “But we need other things, things like soap and towels, for instance.”

“Me show um,” proclaimed Pierre, not without a touch of pride in his handicraft.

“You are simply wonderful, Pierre,” repeated the young woman with the incredibly white hands.

“You’d better ask him,” suggested Paddy, “about cooking things.”

“Yes, there’s also the matter of cooking things,” pursued the valorously patient Janet. “There’s this flour, for instance. Just how should we go about cooking it?”

“Make him bannock,” averred the old redskin.

“But how, Pierre?” persisted Janet, moving companionably close to his side.

“Me show um dinner-time,” said Pierre with a glance up at the sun.

“And I’m afraid we’ll need more wood,” ventured Jinny. “Wood for our fire.”

“Me fix um ax,” he conceded. “You chop wood.”

Jinny laughed at that, quietly and musically.

“But I’m only a woman, you see. I’m not very good at handling an ax.”

“Handle him heap good in canoe two days ago!” Pierre reminded her.

Jinny winced at that. After a brief space of silence, however, she was herself again.

“But to go back to this question of dinner, Pierre,” she pursued with her ingenuous and childlike smile. “What else do you suppose we could have to eat to-day?”

“Me fix fish lines,” was the impassive reply. “You catch um.”

“But I never cooked a fish in my life,” explained the white girl who was wondering, at the moment, just why she had been taught so few of these basic activities of existence.

“Me show um,” said her wrinkled old tutor.

“You are wonderful, Pierre,” proclaimed Jinny, as she patted him on his bent old shoulder. She ignored Paddy’s flicker of a smile as she stepped thoughtfully back into the cabin. From her bunk-head there she picked up the tiny gold wrist-watch that had refused to go since its abrupt immersion in lake-water. “Let me see your hand,” she said as she returned to Pierre’s side. Her eyes were solemn as she fastened the little jeweled chain of linked gold and platinum about the bony bronze wrist. “That is for you,” she said as she backed smilingly away.

Pierre spoke no word of thanks. But he stared long and intently at the strange ornament that glimmered and sparkled so valiantly in the open sunlight And a less somber light glittered in the deep-set eyes.

“Me show um where catch heap good fish,” he proclaimed as he emerged from that momentary trance.

So two hours later, after Paddy and Jinny had thrilled to the first tug of a black bass on the end of their lines, after they had watched the old Indian scale and clean their catch, after they had stood over him as he kneaded the flour and water and bacon-fat into thick disks of dough and baked it into bannocks, they dined on fried fish rolled in corn-meal and boiled turnips and freshly stewed dried apples and warm bannock and weak tea.

“This might be worse,” proclaimed Paddy, as she licked her fingers. She stretched with the contentment of the well-fed young animal she found herself to be. The narcotic noonday sun lay warm on the little hollow between the pine-groves. An early bee buzzed in at the shack door, roved noisily about between the narrow walls, and wandered away again. Pierre, who had hobbled down to the lake for a pail of water, stood a motionless black silhouette against the reflected light as he stared mysteriously across at the mainland.

“This might be worse,” repeated Paddy, as she leaned back on the split-log door-step and let the sunlight soak into her relaxed young body. “I rather like the smell of this air up here.”

But Jinny, who had been pacing restlessly about the cabin, spoke with unexpected sharpness.

“But I don’t like the size of this shack,” she frowningly proclaimed. “We need another room here, and something better than log stools to sit on.”

“How’ll you get them?” Paddy asked indolently.

“I think we’ll get them,” retorted Janet as she pioneered about the deeper corners of the cabin. “And here’s a cotton blanket that can be cut up for clothes. And an old flannel shirt that can surely be cut down for one of us. And here’s a khaki hunting-suit with a hole burned through the coat. But there’s no reason it can’t be made over.”

Paddy, peering across her shoulder, found little reason for triumph in that discovery.

“Did you ever sew?” she demanded.

“No, but I suppose I can learn,” was Jinny’s slightly retarded reply.

“Who’ll teach you?”

“Pierre will.” And Paddy wondered why, at that particular moment, she should remember that Jinny’s face had always been acknowledged a lovely one.

“And how about stockings?” asked the younger girl as she slapped at a mosquito that had settled on her knee.

“I asked Pierre about that,” explained the lady with the star-like eyes. “He says that there’s wool from the sheep and that we spin the wool into yarn and then knit the yarn into stockings. He’s promised to make us knitting-needles out of bone.”

This seemed to give the younger girl much to think about, for she stood silent a full minute before moving slowly toward the door again.

“How long are we here for?” she questioned, for the second time that day.

“Ask me that in a week,” was Jinny’s quietly enunciated answer.

Paddy’s upraised hand followed the wavering course of a hungry mosquito, which she finally obliterated against a wall-log.

“Pierre says he’ll fix up some mosquito-bars for us,” she irrelevantly observed. And she added, with equal irrelevancy: “You know, Jinny, I’m beginning to feel that women are rather helpless without a man around.”

“And woman’s problem,” averred Jinny, “is to keep them around!”

Paddy’s eyes were solemn.

“We haven’t much to work on,” she ruminatively observed.

“Au royaume des aveugles,” quoted the faintly smiling Jinny, “les borgnes sont rois.”

“Which means?” demanded Paddy.

“That even old Pierre isn’t to be entirely overlooked,” announced Jinny as she studied her face faintly reflected in a bread-tin which she had scoured and burnished with wood-ashes. But the misty and distorted reflection of her own features, apparently, weren’t altogether to her liking, for the grimace that she made as she tossed aside the tin was one of disdain shot through with indifference.

Janet was trying to gut a fish. The fish in question was a slimy-bodied muskallonge which Pierre had hooked on his way over to the island. She had scraped at its scales until her fingers ached with weariness; she had dug out its fins with her dull-bladed kitchen-knife; she had shut her eyes and crunchingly cut off the tapered head that stared up at her in solemn-visaged disapproval. And now she was trying to remove the entrails.

But Janet’s knife was dull, the skin of the fish was tough, and it impressed her, on the whole, as an incredibly loathsome and laborious way of acquiring an evening meal. She shivered as she tore open the pallid belly and shut her jaw tight before she could summon up courage to pull away the embedded viscera.

She stopped, suddenly, and stared at her hands. They were maculated with mucus and blood. It impressed her as essentially unfair that she should be confronted with such tasks. It was bestial and degrading and made her feel a little sick at her stomach. She was not made for contact with such things. And she hated so much blood and stickiness.

“Filthy—it’s filthy!” she gasped as she flung the offal aside with dripping fingers.

She had to breathe deep and steady her nerves before she could take up the big bloody carcass that had slipped from her grasp. She even refused to look up as Paddy, with an iron mixing-spoon in her hand, came and stood over her.

“They certainly ought to come already cleaned,” observed the younger girl.

“I used to think they did,” muttered Jinny, as she stared down at a spine-stab in her hand.

“But everything seems to have insides,” conceded the thoughtful-eyed Paddy.

“Then I don’t want to handle ’em,” was Jinny’s embittered ultimatum.

“But somebody’s always had to do it, I suppose,” pursued the girl with the iron spoon, “only we never knew about it. They certainly never skinned themselves and lay down to go by-by in a neat little bed of water-cress and sliced cucumber.”

“Women,” protested Jinny, “weren’t meant for such work.”

“But a lot o’ them must have done it,” averred Paddy as she squatted down on the moss-covered rock. “They must have cleaned fish and cut up animals and scraped hides and carried water and washed out dirty clothes and boiled turnips and lugged in fire-wood and wondered where their next meal was going to come from.”

“You mean,” corrected Jinny, “before they were civilized.”

“But somebody has to do it, even for the civilized people. The funny thing is that it’s all been done behind our backs, that we’ve never seen it.”

“Who wants to see it?” demanded Jinny.

And Paddy, for a moment or two, frowned over that problem.

“I wonder,” she finally ventured, “if people can’t sometimes get too civilized? We had water-pipes and porcelain taps and steam-heat and rose-colored restaurants and big factories to make things for us and fool-proof automobiles to carry us about—and all we had to do for it was sign a check. But it’s begun to dawn on me, Jinny, that there was always somebody just around the corner doing the dirty work.”

“They’re welcome to it,” was Jinny’s listless rejoinder.

“But why weren’t we shown things?” protested the other. “Why weren’t we taught to do something?”

“Because some big-chief lord of creation chose to do them for us. Because men wanted to work and make money.”

“And left us empty-handed!”

Jinny wiped the half-dried gore from her knife-blade.

“Then I suppose father’s big idea is really to starve us into a knowledge of how much he’s been doing for us!”

But Paddy demurred at that.

“I don’t believe Dad ever really demanded gratitude from us. He’s not that trivial. But did it ever occur to you that he may have had a half-way human desire to wake us up to what we actually ought to be grateful for?”

“That sounds like ditching the car to show how smooth the roads were.”

But still again Paddy shook her bobbed head in dissent.

“No, Jinny, you’re wrong. He may not be doing it in the right way, but it seems to me he’s really trying us out. He’s doing his darnedest to teach us to stand on our own feet. And that’s why I rather want to muck through this next month or two, if it can be done. It’s not so much that I want to justify myself, if you get what I mean. But I’ve got a half-hearted sort of hunch that we ought to justify poor old Dad.”

Jinny’s eye remained a smoldering one.

“For being quarantined on a God-forsaken island like this?” she demanded.

“We’re both alive,” retorted the younger girl.

“If you call it living,” asserted her sister.

“It will certainly seem more like living,” announced Paddy as she rose to her feet, “when we get that fish washed and baked and smothered in a plate of mashed turnips.”

Jinny’s laugh was a mirthless one.

“And when I get sandals or bearskin mules to put on these feet of mine,” she added as she ran an explorative finger along the bruised and reddened sole of her foot.

“Pierre,” announced Paddy, “is going to show us how to make moccasins to-night.”

And this Pierre did, with scraps of smoke-tanned hide and hunting-knife and rabbit-bone needle, and split animal-fiber for sewing-thread. He stolidly measured the small and narrow feet and cut the creosotic hide and showed the bewildered white women how to stitch together the heavy seams. But it was slow work for their untrained fingers and when the long northern evening deepened into twilight the old Indian built a fire in the cabin-yard and in the wavering light of its flames the three preoccupied figures sat fashioning their rough footwear of the wilds. They were oddly silent as they worked. And the two smaller and paler figures looked strangely timeless in their thong-bound robes of blanket-cloth, looked as though they belonged to the age of bronze, where life was simple and rough and self-contained.

Paddy, when her fingers were tired from forcing the rough needle-point through the resisting hide-edges, sat back with a sigh, staring at the fire-glow that lighted up the little ravine between the black-fringed rock-shoulders on either side of them. For the first time it came home to her, as she sat there, how much illumination meant to modern life, how all modern cities flowered at dusk into happy gardens of light. Here on their island they had no wall-switches to turn and no shaded bulbs to spring into rose-tinted radiance. They had no lamps, no cressets and torches, not even a candle. They had only the flame of an open fire, burning the wood of the forest. They went to bed with the birds and awakened with the rising sun. That, she assumed, was the way the Lord of Life had originally meant them to live, the sane and natural way of unquestioning animals. But men had not been satisfied to remain merely animals. They had made tools and machinery and gathered into closely packed camps and looked more and more to especially trained neighbors for their needs. They had learned trades and professions and specialized in their own pursuits and left life so hopelessly complicated that no man or woman could ever again be entirely alone or independent or apart from the herd.

She herself, she knew, could never be altogether alone and altogether happy. She had been spoiled for solitude. She was not unconscious of a vague but abysmal want in her life. She had an unworded dread of the darkness, a craving for companionship, a hunger for something protectional between her and the ever-deepening shadows. It dawned on her, as she studied the bent and shadowy figure of old Pierre, that it was not men and women in the aggregate she wanted, but a man, a mate, a camp-guard of her own, a tribe-partner to link with her reckless, groping womanhood.

She would always have to depend on a man. And men, on the other hand, seemed to look for that dependence and like it. That, apparently, was a part of the scheme of things. She hadn’t, of course, much to give them in return, beyond the fact that she might possibly brighten up their day for them about the same as a rose in a water-glass would brighten up her Dad’s office-desk. But the wheels of the world would grind on without her being of much use to it. She couldn’t even clothe or feed herself. She couldn’t sew as straight a seam in a square of buckskin as the quavering-handed old Pierre. She couldn’t skin a rabbit and cut it up for a stew without his help. She was merely an ornament. And another week or two of wilderness life would turn her into a failure at that. She was a flat tire, a flop.

And Paddy, without quite knowing it, fell to thinking fundamentally about existence, for the first time in her life. She still sat by the fire, even after Pierre had gruntingly groped about for his possessions and paddled off in the darkness. She sat there with knitted brows, remembering how Peter had once called her a gate-crasher. But in those airiest flights of hers, she recalled, she had always ridden on somebody else’s back. She had never learned to walk alone.

“I wonder,” said the voice of Jinny across the bed of birch-wood coals, “just what the bunch is doing at the Lido to-night?”

“And if the Park still looks the same from the Century Roof?” added the slightly homesick Paddy. “And who waded into the gold-fish pond out at Charlette’s last night? And if the Ambassador orchestra is playing that same old Manon aria, and if the same old crowd is swinging out to the Arrow-Head, and if the police really took up the plate-mirror floor at the Rose-Tree?”

“Why should they?” inquired the indifferent-voiced Jinny.

“Because it was so cheaply vulgar,” was Paddy’s unexpected reply.

“You danced on it often enough.”

“That was before I knew better.”

“And before we reached the refinement of taking a bath in a jam-pail,” retorted Jinny.

“Well, it’s the keeping clean that counts.”

“I could do it a trifle easier with a cake of French soap.”

“Pierre says we’ll be able to make pretty good soap by leaching the lye out of our wood-ashes and boiling it down with animal fats. He says that’s all any soap is, if you leave out the perfume.”

“I hope it smells a little better than his boiled rabbit.”

Paddy sat silent a moment.

“We can’t afford to be too choosey,” she said when she looked up from the coal-glow, “but I was just wondering how an iced Casaba with lime-juice and orgeat would taste? And then a sauté of soft-shell crabs with braised celery followed up with a tangerine ice and a pot of Antoine’s coffee?”

“Shut up!” cried Jinny, as she rose to her feet and shook out her dirt-smeared blanket. “I’m hungry enough as it is.”

Paddy did her best to remain solemn.

“There’s still a piece of that corn-meal hoe-cake on the grub-box,” she casually reminded her sister.

“I finished that up before I came out,” confessed Janet the untamed.

It was mid-afternoon, several days later, when Janet repaired to a shoulder of shore-rock which Pierre had pointed out to her as a good place for fishing. She was clad in a smoke-stained khaki hunting-suit roughly stitched together with fish-line, and on her feet she wore moccasins with doe-skin leggings that laced almost to the knee.

Both her face and hands were slightly sunburned, but there was a new look of absorption in her eyes as she cast and recast her fly along the still and shadowy waters of the rock-pool. The lines of petulance about her crisply curved lips seemed less marked. She was finally and unequivocally partaking of the providence of Nature. And her movements, as she fought with fish after fish and finally lost or landed each, were marked by a new quiet determination that sometimes merged on grimness. For it was her daily food that she was harvesting. She had learned the first law of the wilderness. She knew the need, now, of amassing supplies beyond the call of the moment. Food, after all, did not rain down from Heaven. It was expedient to have a reserve stock, something between the exigent human stomach and actual starvation, something for hungry mouths to turn to in case of accident or inclement weather. And it was comforting to know that one had even fish-meat, smoked and dried after the manner in which Pierre was teaching them to smoke and dry it, stored away for the unknown future.

Janet could see, as she glanced back over her shoulder, the companionable blue smoke going up from their cabin chimney. She could discern the pile of stove-wood which Pierre had cut for them that morning. She could make out Paddy’s gray figure as she gathered up their sunning blankets, draped them over her bare arm, and carried them in through the cabin door. And she wondered why, as the sun sank lower, the unfathomed centripetal tug of that cabin should increase. But more than once now, as night had come on, she had felt the drawing power of that central point of their life, the call of fire and shelter amid the solitude, the demand for security in the midst of the unknown. It wasn’t much, but for the time being it meant Home. And that word, she began to realize, could take on a meaning which she had never before awakened to.

She had ceased to cast and was staring frowningly down at her hand, where an embedded fish-spine had left the flesh sore, when she became aware of movement, unexpected movement, along the open surface of the lake.

It was a canoe, she saw as she looked up, a canoe that had slowly and quietly rounded the outer point. It was a small and battered-looking old birch-bark, in which sat a solitary paddler. This paddler, who seemed to be trolling for fish as he indolently skirted the shore-line, reminded her of a scarecrow bowled over by a gust of wind.

Janet, as she stared intently at that drifting shadow, saw that her scarecrow was a young Indian, an unkempt and ragged-looking Indian in a ridiculously tattered felt hat. He sat inert and relaxed, slumped listlessly down, neither greatly interested in his surroundings nor in the spoon and line which he so lazily trailed behind his drifting canoe. Yet he started visibly when the white girl called out to him.

“Hello,” said Janet, with a friendly enough wave of the hand.

But the brown-faced youth in the canoe made no answer. He merely sat stunned, staring at the unexpected figure on the rock-shelf.

“Where are you from?” demanded the girl, advancing to the extreme end of her rock-point.

But still there was no answer. The young man in the canoe slowly and vacantly pulled in his spoon and dropped it at his feet.

“Come here, please,” was the slightly imperious request that went caroling across the water. But the frowning Indian, for reasons known only to himself, ignored that modified command. He even turned away, with what seemed a movement of abashment. And before the girl on the rock-shelf could speak to him further he took up his paddle, swung about his canoe, and resolutely headed for the open water of the opal-green lake. He looked back once or twice, oddly like an animal in flight, but he paddled on until the distance swallowed him up.

This encounter, inconsequential as it was, gave Janet a good deal to think about. Uncouth as that young stranger had been in appearance and movement, he continued to loom absurdly large on the horizon of consciousness. She even found a vague exhilaration in the mere thought of a second able-bodied man, white or red, in their immediate neighborhood. But she was indeterminately depressed, on the other hand, by that unresponsive stranger’s flight from her presence. It was an experience somewhat new to her.

Yet she was cool enough about it as, that night after supper, she passed the information on to Paddy.

“There’s a man in the offing,” she casually announced as she sat wiping a crockery plate on a square of well-boiled bagging-hemp.

“You mean Pierre?” observed Paddy. She was busy, at the moment, scrubbing their greasy skillet with wood-ashes.

“No; a much younger Indian. He was fishing along our shore-line. But he went like a rabbit when I spoke to him.”

This, however, quite failed to impress Paddy.

“What difference does it make?” she demanded as she polished the skillet and hung it up behind the stove.

“I don’t know yet,” answered the meditative-eyed Janet. “But it shows we’re not so much alone up here as father imagined. And everything helps.”

Paddy stopped to wring out her wash-cloth of tattered khaki.

“By the way,” she observed, “Pierre’s promised to dig our turnip patch for us. And he’s bringing me a flint and steel, in case our fire goes out.”

Janet’s movement was one of impatience.

“I wish you wouldn’t talk about those things!”

“Why not?” asked Paddy as she wiped off the top of the grub-box.

“Because I don’t want to think of the future.”

“But somebody’s got to think of the future.” And Paddy, as she spoke, took up their once blunt kitchen-knife and tested its cutting-edge with her thumb. Pierre had showed her how to sharpen it on a slab of sand-stone, and with that knowledge had come a new and happier era in her housework.

“And how we’ll den up like bears when the leaves start to fall,” suggested the morose-eyed Jinny.

“Well, we’re here,” proclaimed Paddy, “and we’ve got to make the best of it.”

But Jinny’s brow remained clouded.

“The one thing I can’t get over,” she finally affirmed, “is the useless cruelty of all this. There were easier ways of getting rid of us. And father knows it. But that’s the humiliating part of the whole thing, the thought that you’re about as important as a dead cat that somebody can toss into the back alley.”

“Perhaps we weren’t,” suggested Paddy, as she stooped to put fresh wood on the fire.

“But all father is doing,” maintained Janet, “is fooling himself. He’s sentimentalizing that old strong-man stuff. And it’s about as absurd, after all, as the old cheap-John fiction idea that as soon as a he-man confronts a civilized girl with roughness she’s ready to succumb to his manly strength. There’s nothing to it. Peter knew that. And poor old Peter’s way was the right way.”

“I can’t see that it ever got him very far,” was Paddy’s preoccupied comment. “Or that it did either of us much good.”

“Do you think this Napoleon on St. Helena stuff is doing us much good?”

Paddy did not answer at once. She first seated herself with a frayed flannel shirt which, with the help of one of Pierre’s rabbit-bone needles, she was laboriously fashioning into a blouse.

“It may sound absurd,” she said as she bent frowningly over her sewing, “but I find that I’m actually learning to sleep right. I did nine hours without a turn last night. And this morning when I swung that door open and watched the sun come up I felt almost happy. I don’t mean I’m crazy about this sort of thing. I couldn’t be satisfied until I had sugar and coffee and soap and cold cream and a tooth-brush and a few more clothes. But there could be worse things than being here.”

“Name them,” was the morose challenge.

But Paddy sat silent a moment.

“I suppose we could still make a stab at being good sports,” she finally observed.

“How?” demanded Jinny.

“By taking our medicine,” retorted the other, “and taking it without whining.”

“But I never asked for it,” objected Jinny. “And I don’t want it. And it looks to me like being suddenly thrown overboard. That, I believe, is the way Indians teach their children to swim. But it’s a rotten way, to my manner of thinking.”

Still again Paddy stood silent.

“It isn’t altogether our fault, of course, that we’re so useless. There didn’t seem anything much to do. But I can’t say that city life was such a bed of roses. We kidded ourselves along and pretended the world was our oyster. But I always felt like something in a squirrel-cage. We kept on the jump without getting anywhere.”

“You’re not trying to say,” demanded Jinny, “that you like this sort of thing?”

Paddy’s reply seemed slightly irrelevant.

“Pierre’s showing me how to make meal out of dried bullrush roots, and he says we’ll have fresh flour before another week’s gone.”

“Bullrush roots! How nice and woodsy! And I suppose I’ll have to turn a cart-wheel when the blue-berries start to come in!”

But Paddy refused to bow to that sharper note.

“It’s for you, darling, that the old boy seems to be breaking his neck.”

Jinny’s frown, however, did not disappear.

“Well, it’s a pretty left-handed line of service. You may have observed that the old redskin declines to let me ride in his canoe. And that log-raft I tried so hard to get together, you may also have observed, has mysteriously disappeared.”

“I suppose Pierre has his promises to keep,” proffered Paddy.

“He’s at least improving,” acknowledged Jinny. “And I intend to see that it continues.”

Paddy looked up from her sewing.

“D’you think, Jinny, that we’re playing quite fair with that old redskin?”

“Perhaps we can teach him to play fair with us. And, anyway, did our own father play exactly fair with us—dumping us here on an island full of copperheads?”

“Are there copperheads?”

“Well, there might be, for all he cared. And black flies and mosquitoes don’t make such a bad second. But we’ve a right to let Pierre help us out a little if he’s willing to. And we’ve a right to let the old fellow feel his importance. That’s a woman’s privilege. And we need all of ’em that we can hang on to.”

“I s’pose that’s why Peter used to call us grafters.”

“Peter,” proclaimed the other, “had better stick to his pill-boxes. He used to worry about us getting blinded with wood-alcohol, but my vision’s still clear enough to spot about the only fighting chance that’s left for women like us. D’you remember when we started taking those riding-lessons at Dorland’s? And how that German riding-master made us stop and ‘mak a leetle ofer our horses,’ as he phrased it? We seemed to get along better with them, after a little petting. It made them easier to ride. Well, the same thing applies to men.”

“When you have the men to lean on,” Paddy reminded her.

“As a clinging vine,” acknowledged the candid Jinny, “I’ll always need ’em.”

“Which means you’ll always be at their mercy!”

Jinny’s laugh was defensively curt.

“Then I’ll do my darnedest never to let them know it,” she averred, taking a deep breath. “And I’d give an arm, almost, for a cigarette.”

“Why not try making one?”

“I have, twice, Miss Robinson Crusoe. But I can’t agree with the Injun who gets a kick out of willow-bark. It only burns my throat.”

Paddy sighed as she rose to her feet. Her face remained thoughtful as she shut the stove damper and slapped at a mosquito on her fore-arm.

“Pierre is going to show me how to butcher a sheep to-morrow,” she casually announced. “And butchered sheep means a real roast of mutton. Fish may be good brain-food, and we may have needed it, but I’m rather fed up on anything that floats in water!”

The next morning, however, when Paddy was discovering the ancient and authentic source of mutton, her older sister was pioneering along an equally unexpected line of knowledge. For when Janet went down to the lake for a pail of water, instead of seeing the decrepit-looking Pierre landing from his canoe, she found her timorous visitor of the day before solemnly stepping ashore.

Instead of beholding a ragged and unkempt young Indian, however, she saw a stiff-shouldered and brown-skinned young man in what looked like an officer’s uniform, with every buckle and button polished, with belt and puttees shimmering, and with three indecipherable decorations glinting side by side on the left breast of the slightly rumpled service-coat.

Janet tried not to gasp. But there was something theatrical about both the completeness and the abruptness of that transformation, just as there was a touch of the theatrical in the silent promptitude with which the man in the uniform clicked his heels together and saluted.

“Oh, it’s you,” said Janet, inadequately enough, as she put down her pail. But her scrutiny of him, close as it was, remained coldly impersonal. “Why did you run away yesterday?”

The brown features stiffened a trifle at that, but the question remained unanswered.

“Do you happen to speak English?” she inquired, smiling in spite of herself.

“Rather,” was the altogether unexpected reply.

It was Janet this time who grew solemn.

“How interesting,” she said, still coolly impersonal. “And why are you wearing that uniform? And those little doodadds on the front?”

He resented, plainly enough, that habitual derisive note in her voice. But she admired the grimness of the dignity that was keeping his face impassive.

“I won those on the Western Front,” he said with an effort at casualness. Yet he remained motionless as she continued to study him.

“You look rather young to have been through the war,” she ventured.

“I was,” he proclaimed with a purely achieved languidness.

She hesitated over her next question.

“Are you an Indian?” she finally inquired.

“I am Chief Black Arrow,” he said with more hauteur than seemed necessary.

“That means you have a tribe, doesn’t it?” asked Janet as she sat down on her overturned pail.

Black Arrow’s shrug impressed her as an oddly sophisticated one. It said so much and at the same time left so much unsaid.

“I was a Carlisle Indian before I came north,” he casually explained. “My people are all south of the Line.”

“Carlisle is an Indian school, isn’t it?”

“Yes. But I had a year at Dickson College before I went to Oxford.”

“Oxford?” echoed the young woman on the overturned pail. That, she mentally admitted, tended to account for the unexpected world-weariness in the full-voweled intonation. “Did you like Oxford?”

“Rather,” admitted the young redman. “I was on their polo team. But I preferred cow-punching. And I was a bit of a boxer in those days. In fact, I almost took it up as a business. But the war came, and that gave me my chance. Care to smoke?”

Janet stared rather wide-eyed at the opened nickel case that held two solitary cigarettes. They looked slightly battered about the edges.

“Thanks,” she murmured as she took one and leaned toward the lighted match-end which he held out for her. “Are these your last?”

Black Arrow’s shrug was at least a courtly one. Even though the last, it implied, it was an honor to share them with a lady so gracious.

“Won’t you sit down?” asked Janet, after a moment of meditative silence.

She noticed, for the first time, the Indian moccasins beneath the polished military puttees. And when he sat down, she likewise observed, there was something unmistakably aboriginal in his manner of squatting on his crossed legs. It made the uniform with the flashing buttons slightly incongruous. And he wasn’t so young, after all, as he had first appeared.

“Tell me about the war,” she pursued, “I mean what you did, and what you got out of it.”

She noticed, for the first time, the blackness of his eyebrows and the incommunicable moroseness of the deep-set and Indian-dark eyes. They were estranging eyes, as remote, in one way, as an animal’s. And yet about him was an air of artlessness that made the meditative woman think of an overgrown child, a child a trifle too conscious of the impression it might be creating.

“This was about all I got out of it,” Black Arrow was saying in a deep-throated voice that impressed his listener as slightly saxophonic. He touched the medals on his breast and passed a brown hand along the face of his tunic.

“But that implies bravery, doesn’t it?” demanded Janet, blinking at the decorations.

“Oh, I did quite a bit of sniping. But I got rather tired of it in the end; seven hours, sometimes, waiting for a shot. I was still an Indian, you see. And when I got my lieutenancy, after Givenchy, the older men didn’t find it so easy to forget that. We had a row or two, and I was transferred to the Eighty-Fifth. But I was restless then and glad enough when the show was over.”

“Were you wounded at all?” asked Janet, taking a deeper breath.

“Five times,” answered Black Arrow, without emotion.

“And afterward?” prompted the young white woman.

The bronze-skinned warrior threw away his cigarette-end.

“Then came rather a different kind of a fight,” he quietly acknowledged. “I had an offer or two of inside work, after I got my discharge at Winnipeg. But I couldn’t stand being shut up between four walls. You see, I’m an Indian. I thought I was civilized, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t quite think with a white man’s brain. I wanted to be outdoors. When they told me I’d go back to the feathers, I laughed at them, at first. I drifted around for a year, cow-punching, horse-breaking, acting as a guide on a dude-ranch, riding buckers at the stampedes. It didn’t lead to anything. And I guess I was drinking a good deal. So I got tired of it all and went back.”

“Back to what?”

“Back to the blanket.”

She sat intently studying his face.

“How do you mean you went back to the blanket?” she finally inquired.

“That’s the way they phrase it out here, when an educated Indian goes back to living as his ancestors lived.”

“And you preferred that?” she asked, perplexed.

“It seemed the easiest way,” was the answer.

“And you’ve been up here in the wilderness ever since?”

Again she saw the incongruous, worldly shrug of the shoulder.

“I tried traveling with the Buffalo Bill circus outfit, for one winter,” acknowledged the other. “And once I was down in your city, at the Sportsmen’s Show in the old Garden there. But all I’ve done in the last year or two is a little guide work and a bit of timber-cruising for the big pulp company.”

“What big pulp company?” she asked. She was wondering why she felt vaguely sorry for him.

“Your father’s,” was his answer.

“Then you know who I am?”

He nodded assent. But his face remained impassive.

“How did you find that out?”

“By moccasin telegraph, if you know what that means.”

“And why we are here?” she pursued.

“I was told you were wrecked on the island.”

“That is quite true, in one way. But who told you?”

“Old Pecotte, for one.”

“Does that mean Pierre?” she inquired, resenting the slightly contemptuous note that had crept into his voice.

Still again he nodded assent.

“Then we’re not so alone up here as I imagined?” she ventured.

“You will find very few neighbors about here. It is not a good country for white women.”

“You mean it is dangerous?”

“Not dangerous, but hard,” he amended.

“So it seems,” she murmured, looking down at her hands. When she glanced up at him, however, she did so with her most engaging smile. “But we have you. You will help us, won’t you?”

“How?”

She sat silent a moment before speaking.

“You see, two children have been shut up in the dark closet for being bad. And we may need somebody to help us get away.”

That speech seemed to give him considerable to think over.

“Your father,” he finally explained, “is a very powerful man up in this territory. Once it was the factors of the Great Company. Now it’s the man with the timber rights.”

“The Pulpwood King!” said Janet, with a tinge of bitterness.

To that ejaculation, however, Black Arrow ventured no reply.

Janet’s contemplative eyes were studying him.

“Could you take a message out for me,” she ventured, “if you were well paid for it?”

He stiffened at that, unexpectedly.

“I do not go out,” he finally explained.

“So they’re all against us!” she reflected aloud.

“I am not against you,” he protested. Instead of looking at her, however, he was staring out over the lake. “I think you could be very happy here, once you made up your mind to take what the country gives you.”

“And eat bullrush-flour and hold my hand over my heart and gasp out: ‘Oh, the glorious primitiveness of it all!’ ”

Her bitterness seemed to puzzle him.

“The people who live here seem to get along comfortably enough,” he pointed out. “It’s merely a matter of fitting yourself into your background.”

“But it’s not easy to change your world overnight.”

“Yes, I’ve found that out—as an Indian.”

She was on the point of protesting that she was not an Indian, and never intended to be one. But instead of that, when his clouded glance returned to her, she said something quite different. There were not many oaks, in that territory, for unsupported vines to reach out to.

“Could you help to make us happy?” she found the courage to inquire.

If he had been a white man, she felt, he might have flushed. But his face was oddly barricaded as he rose to his feet. She thought, at first, that it was a movement to dissemble some inward disquiet, but she saw as she glanced over her shoulder that it was prompted by the unexpected approach of Paddy, a wide-eyed and wondering Paddy with blood-stains on her tunic and a shimmer of fish-scales on her slightly reddened fore-arms.

“Hello,” said Paddy, obviously startled by the stranger in the military uniform. But for all the oddness of her attire, Janet noticed, the younger woman in the frayed flannel shirt and with the exceptionally heightened color stood undeniably appealing to the eye.

“This, Paddy,” she proceeded to explain with a solemnity that held the faintest trace of mockery, “is our friend and neighbor, Chief Black Arrow, who is going to do so much to make us more comfortable here.”

Paddy, as she directed a searching glance at her sister, paid scant attention to the foolish-appearing salute of the man in the military uniform.

“That’s nice,” she said, quite without enthusiasm, her thoughts plainly elsewhere. There was even a frown on her face as she stared at the stained moccasins below the polished leather puttees.

Janet, sniffing that thin aroma of hostility, turned to Black Arrow with a new-born flicker of audacity.

“Couldn’t you dine with us to-day?” she said as she stooped to take up her water-pail.

“Thank you,” was the unexpected reply, “but I don’t think old Pecotte would approve of that.”

“What has old Pecotte got to do with it?” demanded Janet.

“Isn’t he looking after you?”

It took Janet, apparently, some time to digest all that this implied. “Not entirely,” she proclaimed. “The intention was, I believe, that we should look after ourselves.”

Black Arrow, obviously, stood impervious to her note of bitterness.

“I am very glad to help you, if you need help,” he said with a reinstating simplicity of manner.

“That is very kind of you,” replied Janet, a new earnestness in the glance which she directed toward him. “And you can help us, I know, in ever so many ways.” She noticed his hesitating movement toward the beached canoe. “When shall we see you again?”

“To-morrow?” he suggested. And even Paddy frowned over the hungry note in the brusk yet boylike voice.

“Wonderful,” said Janet. “And if you could spare us a few matches, would you mind bringing them over with you?”

Instead of answering her, he reached into the side-pocket of his tunic and produced a worn box of English wax vestas.

“Permit me,” he said, holding out the box.

“But we’re robbing you.”

He still held them in his extended hand. Frederigo, heroically frying his last falcon for the lady of his dreams, could not have made the gesture a more courtly one.

“But not all of them,” demurred the Monna Giovanna of the woods. “Suppose we divide them.”

They divided them solemnly, four apiece. But the young white woman still stood studying him.

“I hate to have to ask it,” she ventured, “but have you any sugar in your—your camp?”

That question seemed to embarrass him.

“Would maple sugar do?” he countered.

“It would be heavenly!” cried Janet.

“When I come to-morrow,” proclaimed the Frederigo of the forest as he reached for his paddle, “I think I can bring some maple sugar with me.”

“You’re really rather wonderful!” said Janet, holding out her hand to him.

Paddy, having fashioned an armless bathing-suit out of an old cotton flour-sack, promptly decided that the water of Lake Wapanapi should be warm enough for a daily swim. So, while Janet was still asleep, she slipped out of the cabin with her towel of bagging-hemp over one arm and picked her way out to a rocky point where she could take a header into deep water.

The sun, already up above the pine-tops, shone warm enough on her bare shoulders. But those northern waters, she knew, would bring a chilling shock to her body when they took possession of it. So she hesitated for a moment or two, staring down into their amber-tinted depths. Then, having fortified herself for the impending plunge, she took a deep breath, raised her hands above her head, and went arrowing below the unruffled surface.

A small howl of misery escaped her lips as she reappeared, for Lake Wapanapi, she found, was even colder than she had imagined. And as she swam vigorously to the right, heading for the little cove with the fringe of sand about its inner curve, she resorted to repeated seal-like sounds of “Blu-blub! Blu-blub!” while she fought her tingling way shoreward.

Even when she felt land under her feet and stood knee-deep in that chilling element she emitted a serio-comic wail of “Wow!” before wading ashore. And it was only as that relieving wolf-howl died away on her lips that she became conscious of the sound of laughter close beside her.

This laughter, she saw as she looked about, was not coming from a lake-loon preening itself at the cove-side, but from a bareheaded young man in an oil-stained leather jacket, a frank-faced, hard-eyed and rather self-assured young man with a brier pipe in one hand and a goggled flying-helmet in the other. And as Paddy blinked perplexedly up at him she saw for the first time the weathered seaplane moored close to the shelving cove-side. She saw the lettered moored gondola and the outspreading yellow wings embossed with their faded double circles, sidling close to the shore-lip and looking uncommonly like an amphibian about to climb from one element to another. Then she glanced back at the hazel-eyed man who was so quietly yet so disconcertingly laughing at her.

“Who are you?” she demanded, digging her chilled heels into the warmer sand on which she stood.

“I’m Casey Crowell,” he answered, respectfully enough.

“And what are you doing here?” she demanded.

“Fire ranging and forestry inspection work,” he casually replied, with an explanatory hand-wave toward his moored plane.

“How’d you get here?” asked Paddy, wrapping her hemp towel about her shoulders.

“Flew,” was the answer. “And what are you doing here?”

Paddy stood silent a moment.

“We’re here on a little holiday,” she finally averred.

“Who are ‘we’?” he asked with a note of authority which she resented.

“Jinny and I,” she answered, deciding that she liked his smile. “We’re sisters.”

“Of course,” he agreed, for no reason at all. “But how are you making out?”

Paddy, perplexed by that casual tone, turned and studied him with a narrowed eye.

“You knew we were here?” she challenged.

He laughed at that, in spite of her solemnity.

“That’s part of my business,” he acknowledged. “That’s what I’m paid for—to know every outsider who wanders into this territory.”

“Who pays you?” exacted Paddy, shadowed by a sudden-born suspicion.

“The timber company that operates these limits,” was his reply.

“Then you know my father?” she asked.

“Sure!”

“And he sent you here?”

“Not by a long shot! I’m supposed to be four hundred miles nearer the Manitoba boundary. That’s the boundary, by the way, we showed to be over twenty miles out of position on the government maps.”

Paddy sighed contentedly as she turned and stared at the moored seaplane. She noticed the two lines that tied the wide-winged craft to the two white birches along the bank, and the slightly smoke-stained gondola-side and the twisted propeller poised in the sunlight and so eloquent of power, of waiting and unawakened power.

“How fast can you go?” she asked, with a head-nod toward the plane.

“Eighty or ninety miles an hour in ordinary weather,” was the offhand answer.

And again Paddy’s sigh was a deep one.

“When,” she quietly inquired, “can you take me up?”

“Up?” he questioned, frowning a little.

“Up and out!” amended Paddy, with emphasis.

His surprise, she thought, was altogether too inadequately feigned.

“Do you want to go out?” he demanded.

“Naturally,” she retorted, persuaded that he was merely fencing for time.

“Why?” was his curt inquiry.

Paddy stood silent a moment. It would never do, she reminded herself, to lose her temper with this artless-eyed young man whose wings could so miraculously bridge her new world with her old world.

“You see,” she explained with much deliberation, “we lost practically all our supplies when a canoe sank in the lake out there. That means we’re living under conditions that aren’t any too comfortable.”

She failed to decipher any trace of pity in his quietly meditative eye.

“Why don’t you drag for them?” he asked.

“How?” she countered, rubbing the water from her wet arms.

“Well, you might try a shark-hook on the end of a lake-trout line,” he casually suggested, “or even a fish-gaff at the end of a clothes-line. Did your canoe upset?”

Paddy’s color, for some reason, deepened perceptibly.

“No, it went straight down,” she admitted.

“That ought to make it all the easier,” explained Casey. “Even a hatchet on the end of a tow-rope could get a grip somewhere on a canoe. But how are you fixed for grub?”

“We’ve enough to keep us alive,” was the slightly embittered reply.

“But no luxuries,” suggested the other, with a glance down at the hempen towel. And Paddy, all things considered, resented the note of that suggestion.

“Chief Black Arrow has very kindly promised to bring us in a supply of sugar,” she proclaimed with all the dignity at her command.

“Oh, Black Arrow!” said Casey. And once more he laughed his enigmatic laugh. “I just ran across him down at the Elk Crossing post, dickering for ten pounds of maple sugar. It will take almost fifty miles of paddling to get your sugar, by the way. And I imagine that’s more work than the big chief has done in a year.”

Still again the derisive note in his voice proved objectionable to her.

“Don’t you think that is very—very knightly of him?” she demanded.

“It was kingly,” agreed Casey, “considering the chief’s resources—and his disposition!”

“Are you implying that Black Arrow lacks energy?” she promptly inquired.

“He doesn’t need it, the way he lives.”

Paddy felt vaguely resentful of that speech.

“What have you got against Black Arrow?” she demanded.

“Oh, Black Arrow’s all right!” conceded the man with the flying-cap in his hand. “But I wouldn’t take him too seriously. He’s a bit of a grand-stander. He used to be a moose-rider at the rodeos, and he even acted in an Indian movie they did down at Mattawa a couple of years ago.”

“While you?” challenged Paddy.

“I’m a McGill man!”

“A McGill man! What’s that?”

“You’d know, I suppose, if you lived this side of the Line.”

He was, she felt, being a trifle toplofty.

“But what do you do for a living?”

“Oh, I float around in this old bus, scaring young Nitchies and projecting meridians and scouting for timber and spotting fires and carrying fool messages between the upper camps.”

Paddy’s gaze, as she stared at the plane, was a hungry one. But she resented the careless pride of power which she saw plainly enough in the lazily smiling hazel eyes.

“Well, I’m cold,” she announced, “and I’ve got to get back to camp.”

“Could I go over with you?” he asked in a voice more satisfactorily humble.

“No, you can’t,” was the prompt reply. “We haven’t even had breakfast yet.”

“Then a little later?” he asked, smiling at the bare shoulders which the cold water had pebbled into goose-flesh.

“I suppose so,” she conceded, with paraded unconcern. “Where do you go from here?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” he said as he refilled his pipe.

“Then you’re able to do as you wish?” exacted Paddy.

“I’m free, white, and twenty-one,” answered the pilot in the oil-stained leather jacket, with a renewing note of audacity in his quiet laughter.

Paddy stood for a moment deep in thought.

“Would you be free enough to carry a message down to a telegraph office for me?” she asked, doing her best to make that question seem an inconsequential one.

Casey Crowell shook his head.

“I’d get fired for that,” he proclaimed.

“Could you carry Jinny and me down to the rail-head?”

Still again the bird-man shook his head.

“Not unless the Big Boss ordered it,” he announced.

It took her a little time to digest both the fact and the sense of defeat that came after it.

“Then you’re not so free as you pretended to be?”

“None of us is,” he protested.

“Then you have a fat chance of being a friend of ours,” she said with an answering audacity all her own.

His smile vanished of a sudden.

“I want to be,” he quite solemnly averred.

“Apple-sauce!” she murmured as she studied him from under a lowering brow. She was studying him, in fact, with a shrewdly estimative eye. She was, for all her flippancy, soberly and secretly appraising him, testing his metal on the hard but narrow counter of her experience. And her personal and private conclusion was that he might prove an exceptionally hard nut to crack.

“We really ought to understand each other better,” he was saying, refusing to be embarrassed by her scrutiny.

Still again she resented the note of masterfulness which she could not altogether define. But that resentment, oddly enough, expressed itself in a small and wintry smile.

“Yes, we ought to,” she wistfully agreed. And she directed toward him, before she turned and ran up the rocky slope, the full battery of her soft and limpid eyes. She left him there, rather abstracted and silent, with his unlighted pipe still in his hand, staring with unseeing eyes out over the waters of Lake Wapanapi.

When Casey Crowell appeared at the island cabin, two hours later, he found Paddy putting up a clothes-line of plaited buckskin and Janet valiantly at work with a rabbit-bone needle. She was at work on a stretch of burlap that still bore the miller’s stenciled imprint, fashioning a garment of undecipherable nature. He sobered over this discovery quite as much as over the none too cordial greeting of the older sister. His face lengthened, in fact, after a quick but comprehensive glance about the cabin.

“You are up against it,” he proclaimed as his restless eye returned to the stooping Janet. “Haven’t you any real needles and thread?”

It was Paddy who answered that question. “No,” she announced. “Nor any combs,” she added, “nor even a tooth-brush. I’ve been using a pad of bark-fiber dipped in lake-water. And for soap we use wood-ashes mixed with clay. And just at present we’re using up our meal-sacks for clothes.”

Their visitor, at this, looked genuinely distressed.

“Well, I can at least let you have six or seven yards of airplane linen,” he explained. “It’s rather fine stuff, and especially strong.”

“Would it do for nighties?” demanded Paddy.

“Wonderfully,” acknowledged Casey, not caring to meet her eye.

“And for a step-in apiece,” suggested the grim-eyed Janet.

“Of course,” agreed Casey, as he stared at the rough moose-hide moccasins on Paddy’s feet. “But your quickest way to comfort, I’d say, would be to get that canoe up from the lake-bottom. Could you give me an idea of about where it went down?”

“It’s just offshore over there,” said Paddy with a vague hand-movement toward the lake-water. “But we have no boat.”

“Of course you haven’t. But supposing we rig up a drag and a little log-raft. Do you suppose you could show me about where your wreck lies?”

“Quite easily,” announced Paddy.

“Then we’ll see what we can do,” agreed Casey.

But it didn’t prove so easy as Paddy imagined. After Casey returned from his plane with a hatchet and a mooring line and a grappling-hook made of bent strut-metal, and after they had carpentered together a raft of driftwood found along the remoter shore and after they had paddled resolutely out from the point where the war-canoe went down, they found the lake-water unexpectedly deep and the region for their explorations perplexingly indefinite. Sometimes their drag became lodged between stones and once it became entangled with a sunken cedar-root.

When Casey, patrolling up and down the quiet water, finally proclaimed that he had located the lost canoe, Paddy, in the excitement, tumbled off the wet and slippery raft-logs, and Casey quite unnecessarily jumped in after her and quite unnecessarily held her above the surface and helped her aboard again. But he seemed unconscious enough of the chill of the water as he held the slender young body momentarily in his arms and rather foolishly demanded if she was all right.

“Of course I’m all right,” contended Paddy. “Let’s get busy.”

So they forgot their wet clothes and took up the search again, and once more got their home-made grappling-hook under a thwart of the canoe and slowly and ever so carefully dragged that inert mass in to the shallower water where Casey did his best to keep it on an even keel and tumbled carelessly into the waist-deep shore-water to seize the curved bow and tug it still farther up on the sloping sand.

“We’ve got it!” he proclaimed as the sodden gunwales appeared above the water. “We’ve got it, cargo and all!”

He stopped short when he saw the great ax-cleft in the canoe-bottom, but he ventured no comment on that discovery. He merely fell to work salvaging the sodden bundles and bags and wooden boxes.

“This is a gold-mine,” he said as he tilted up a case of condensed milk for closer inspection. But Paddy, seated on the shore-sand, was busy examining a seal-skin hand-bag whose water-soaked contents brought little cries of woe from her as she lifted them up to the light. She shook out flimsy things of silk, oddly color-streaked, and studied them with morose affection. She unrolled wet stockings and squeezed the water from them, and stared fondly at a pair of sport shoes and opened a half-dissolved vanity-case and wiped off a hand-mirror and in it studied her own face long and intently.

“What a sight!” she cried aloud.

Casey, carrying ashore a case of tinned marmalade, looked down at her over his shoulder.

“You look pretty good to me,” he found the careless frontier audacity to aver.

“Thanks,” said Paddy, already preoccupied with her further explorations. But she was on her feet the next moment, shouting and hallooing for Jinny as she went racing up the bank.

Casey laughed as he saw her disappear over the lightly wooded slope. Then he stooped and picked up a filmy garment of apricot-colored silk, staring at it with a sort of perplexed intentness and putting it down again with a care so deliberated that it might have been taken for tenderness. But his manner was preoccupied as he returned to the task of bringing what remained of the stores ashore.

By the time the two girls were back at the lake-front, in fact, he had the emptied canoe drawn up on the bank and the outboard motor high and dry on a rock for later inspection. Yet Janet, he noticed, betrayed little of her younger sister’s enthusiasm at the rescue of their supplies. Her manner impressed him as almost listless, though a new fire burned in her cloudy eye as she stood studying the overturned war-canoe.

“How are these things patched?” she casually inquired.

“Simply enough,” said Casey as he cut the gunnysack that covered a round box and disclosed a firkin of butter. “All you need is a square of birch-bark and a little tallow and spruce gum. You put the gum on hot, and work it over the seams.”

“And it will float again?” asked Janet.

“If you do your work right,” conceded Casey. But he was more interested, at the moment, in the supplies that he had piled on the bank. “Some of this stuff is spoiled,” he explained. “But you can save most of it, by drying it out properly. Your flour’s gone, I’m afraid, and what’s left of your sugar isn’t worth bothering with. But you have canned honey to take its place.”

Paddy, kneeling meditative-eyed amid those rescued stores, stared abstractedly off into space.

“It’s funny,” she said with a short laugh, “this worrying about things to eat and things to wear. It’s—it’s really rather ridiculous, when you come to think of it.”

“It’s the first law of life,” Casey curtly enough reminded her.

“And what’s the second?” she queried, resenting his note.

He turned on her, unexpectedly solemn.

“There are just two things left, when you get right down to bed-rock,” he said as he stood wet and rough and uncouth in the betraying sunlight. “Just two things—hunger and love.”

“Oh,” said Paddy. She said that and nothing more. But it seemed to leave her unnaturally thoughtful, during the next hour, as they patiently transported their supplies to the shelter of the cabin.

“You’ll have to eat with us now,” Paddy informed him as he helped to open packages.

“All right,” he said without stopping his work. And Paddy was tempted to admire him for saying so without fuss and feathers. But he looked up as he untied a bundle of cotton mosquito-netting. “You’ve sure got enough fly-net,” he announced as he unrolled the many yards of damp fabric. “On the whole, I’d call this a pretty complete outfit. They’ve at least been generous with you.”

“Yes,” was the unexpected retort from Janet, “about as generous as those Sing-Sing officials who give the man in the death chamber a good meal and a brand-new suit of clothes before he goes to the electric chair!”

Casey stopped short at that. His glance rested on her as she stood in the sunlight, her figure half-turned as she tossed a diaphanous tissue of wet silk over the dooryard clothes-line. She impressed him, at the moment, as mistily yet immemorially appealing, as vaguely superb in pose and line as the twisted torso of the Victory of Samothrace.

“You insist on being an irreconcilable,” he said more gently than he had intended.

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” was her half-listless retort.

“Jinny,” interposed Paddy, “has always been revolting.”

But Casey ignored that interruption, still facing the older girl.

“You’re going to be a last-ditcher about all this,” he amplified, with a head-nod toward the cabin where the blue smoke was coiling lazily up from the chimney-top.

“Why shouldn’t I be?” she demanded.

“Will it get you anywhere?” he countered.

“Possibly,” she retorted, with a shrug that was obviously dismissive.

“I’ve seen people pay good money for what you’re getting,” said Casey, disregarding her gesture.

“For what I’m getting?”

“For a summer camp in the woods, in altogether unspoiled territory.”

“Not under the conditions it came to me!”

It was Casey’s turn to shrug. And the frown on his tanned young face did not relax until Paddy, proclaiming from the cabin door that they were going to dine al fresco, asked him if he would be so good as to help her out with the table.

Yet as his eye rested on the younger girl, during that strange meal in the shadow of the clustered pines, he wondered if Paddy’s clearer glance and lighter notes were based on the mere ardency of youth. Even when, after a look at the sky, he proclaimed that it was time for him to hop off, it was Paddy who walked with him to the shore-cove where the plane was moored.

“Where do you go from here?” she asked with an unexpected wistfulness in her voice.

“That,” he evaded, “all depends on orders.”

“Will I ever see you again?” she next inquired, with an immediacy all her own. It sent a vague but undeniable tremor through his stooping body.

“Sooner than you imagine,” was Casey’s answer. He was busy loosening his mooring line.

And Paddy stood vaguely disappointed at the discovery that he had no intention of shaking hands with her.

“So long,” she called out, lightly enough, as he clambered aboard and poled slowly out to open water.

“So long,” he called back. He was busy, she could see, with his machinery, adjusting his flying-cap, turning over his engine, taking his place beside the control-sticks. Then he went taxying along the blue-green lake-water, throwing a double-furrow as he went, taking off at last and rising in a gentle arc that carried him above the silhouetted pine-tops.

Paddy, watching him until he was out of sight, felt an odd spirit of desolation creep into her heart. She seemed incommunicably alone in a world where the afternoon sunlight impressed her as paler than before and the cry of a loon in the open lake sounded inexpressibly lonely to her half-listening ears.

“Darn him!” she said aloud as she turned back to the cabin.

It was three hours later that old Pierre landed on the island. His deep-set eyes, as he carried ashore his sack of flour, read the history recorded in sand and soil about his feet. He said nothing, however, until ready to take his departure.

“Bird-man him bin here,” he announced as Paddy stopped in the midst of carrying in her sun-dried clothing.

“Surely,” said the placid-eyed Paddy.

“Him no come again,” proclaimed the old Indian.

“Why not?” demanded Janet, sudden fire in her eye.

Pierre stood silent a moment.

“Black Arrow him bin here,” he said, his sagging shoulders held higher.

“And is Black Arrow also taboo?” demanded Janet. Her laugh was not an altogether pleasant one.

“Him no come here,” proclaimed Pierre. “If him come, I kill um!” He moved away, unnaturally erect, saying as he went, “Him squaw-man Injin. No good! Him come here I kill um!”

Janet, at the moment, was able to laugh at that foolish threat. But later in the evening, when she wandered guardedly over the glooming hills to the cove-shore where the war-canoe had been left, she found that both the canoe and the log-raft which Casey Crowell had coopered together had mysteriously disappeared.

Janet, during the ensuing week, remained oddly preoccupied and thoughtful. If she found any consolation in a widening margin of safety and a decided increase in material comfort, she made scant effort to put her feelings into words.

Paddy, on the other hand, betrayed a somewhat unexpected lightening of spirit. She seemed, for the time being, to be almost relishing her newer manner of life. She swam with vigor and sang at her work and ate with the unashamed and honest appetite of a boy scout on a mountain hike. Her hands hardened and her skin browned under the prolonging summer sun. She became more adroit at both cooking and sewing. She also formed the habit, when tired of fishing, of shouldering a duck-gun and exploring the remoter portions of Adanak Island. On the southeastern slopes of that island she even found a bank of wild-flowers, fragrant, star-like, delicate. But she knew no name for them. And as she turned homeward, on that warm and windless afternoon, she sniffed from time to time as she followed the line of the wavering shore. She was agreeably conscious of smells, earthly smells, dozens of smells, smells of sun-steeped pine-needles, of sappy young leaves, of water-musk, of parched lichen on bleached old rocks, of woodland blossoms and buds, of warm pool-water and resinous spruce-bark and the final aroma of wood-smoke from their own cabin chimney.

Before she reached that cabin, however, she caught sight of her sister poised against the cobalt-blue of the afternoon sky. Jinny was standing on her favorite shore-rock, staring silently out over the unruffled waters of the open lake.

“Jinny, the one thing you remind me of is Napoleon on St. Helena,” she said as she advanced, laughing, toward her sister. Paddy’s spirits, that day, were running exceptionally high, for early in the morning she had heard the hum of a motor over the shack-roof and when she stumbled sleepily from her bunk and ran out to look she found a small parachute made of airplane-linen tumbled within forty paces of her door. And beneath its crumpled folds were two cakes of rather violently scented hand-soap, a box of unmistakably stale chocolates, and a round and slightly battered wooden carton of dried fruit fringed with paper lace. They had, plainly enough, traveled far and long. But they came, after all, from that kingdom of chivalry which lies golden before the eyes of womanhood.

“You look exactly like Napoleon on St. Helena,” repeated the girl with the duck-gun.

“Well, that’s what I am!” was the other’s slightly acidulated retort.

Paddy sat down and industriously extracted a briar-thorn from her knee.

“You know, this isn’t going to last forever,” she said as she slapped at a black fly that tried to bury itself in her hair.

“That’s truer than you imagine,” proclaimed Jinny.

“What’s in the wind?” asked Paddy, studying her sister’s back.

“Nothing, that I know of,” was the half-listless reply.

“Either of your woodland sheiks over to-day?” was Paddy’s next question.

“Both,” said Jinny, a trifle grimly.

“What happened?”

“A fight.”

This seemed to puzzle Paddy.

“But surely your poor old Pierre couldn’t——” and that was as far as she got.

“It wasn’t that sort of fight,” explained Jinny. “It was mostly a battle of words. They had it out together down on the beach.”

“About what?”

“I had no way of knowing. They talked in their own language, whatever that is. But Black Arrow didn’t back down any. And Pierre paddled off as hot as a hornet.”

Paddy sat silent a moment. “I don’t think we could get along without Pierre,” she ventured.

“Oh, he’ll be back,” averred Jinny.

“And how about Black Arrow?”

It was Jinny’s turn to sit silent. There was a slight hardening of her eyes as she looked at her sister.

“Black Arrow’s taking out a message for me, a telegram to Peter,” she proclaimed.

“Will he?” Paddy meditated aloud.

“I think so. I also did a letter on birch-bark and glued it together with spruce gum.”

Paddy’s frown was a cogitative one.

“His practise would go to pot,” she said, obviously following her own line of thought and speaking of Peter.

“He may not come,” asserted Jinny.

“And if he doesn’t?”

“I’ll have to fall back on Black Arrow.”

Paddy’s shrug was an ambiguous one. “He’s an Indian,” she reminded the other.

“But slightly different,” observed Jinny. “He brought me a couple of fox furs to-day, and two wild ducks all picked and dressed for roasting.”

“Just how does that man live?” questioned Paddy.

“He told me he had a camp of his own, about twenty miles up the lake. I asked him if I could see it, but he hesitated. He seemed afraid I’d think less of him if I found out just how he existed there. He has a trap-line in winter, but he doesn’t seem to do much in summer.”

Paddy suppressed her smile.

“He seems to be busy enough just now.”

But Jinny’s face remained solemn.

“Yes,” she acknowledged, “I’ve been wondering if I can’t help him to live better, to knuckle down and do something worth while.”

It was Paddy’s turn to look impatient.

“But I thought that was our own private nut to crack,” she said, as she glanced over her shoulder toward the cabin of spruce logs. She sat silent a minute or two and then turned back to her sister. “You know, Jinny, I ought to be worried about you. But I’m not. I don’t seem able to worry about anything, these last few days. I find I can get rather drunk on this sunlight and open air and balsam-smell all mixed up together. It’s almost like an anesthetic. I feel so satisfied, just to be alive, that I seem half animal—like a cat in a sunny window or a blacksnake on a warm rock. Honest, I’m getting Indianized.”

Jinny inspected her with a casual eye.

“You look healthy enough,” she acknowledged. “But the rock isn’t always warm for the blacksnake. Wait until a week or two of fall rains in a spruce-log hut.”

“Other people have done it.”

“Of course they have. But they never knew much about the other sort of life. That’s why I feel rather sorry for a man like Black Arrow. There’s so much he has to forget. He played polo with a duke’s son and then went back to a dirty teepee. He was asking me to-day if I remembered how Max Beerbohm described the bells of Oxford in Zuleika Dobson. That’s what I call tragedy.”

“Tragedy?” echoed Paddy, her brows knitted.

“Yes; it isn’t not having things that’s tragic. It’s having them and then seeing them taken away from you. That’s where the big ache comes in. And when I tried to explain that to Black Arrow this afternoon, that backwoods Indian asked me if I recognized the fact that I was quoting Aristotle.”

“Well,” said Paddy, as she rose to her feet, “I wouldn’t waste too much sympathy on that redskin, if I were you.”

But Jinny, for all Paddy’s advice, continued to give considerable thought to Black Arrow and his incongruous manner of existence. When he returned to Adanak Island, several days later, she took him off fishing from her favorite rock-point, and Paddy, inspecting them from time to time, could see that they were in deep and earnest conversation. Even these fleeting glimpses of them, thus immured, tended to touch her with a vague disquiet. And if Paddy could have heard the talk taking place between the two preoccupied figures that disquiet might indeed have sharpened into actual alarm.

“But your telegram,” said Black Arrow, “may not have been delivered.”

“It may not have ever gone out,” amended the morose-eyed young woman.

“Why wouldn’t it?”

“That small-fry despatcher would have to read it,” explained Janet. “And he may be like the rest of the men in this territory,—afraid of the Pulpwood King.”

At this, however, Black Arrow betrayed no trace of animus.

“But your letter must have gone,” he reminded her.

“A letter travels slowly.” She lifted her eyes, lustrous with anxiety, to the bronze-skinned man at her side. “And suppose even that doesn’t bring any answer?”

He stared thoughtfully out over the lake.

“Will it make much difference?” he asked.

“It’ll mean that I’ve only you to depend on,” was her reply, not without its deliberated provocation.

That held him silent a moment.

“Then I hope no answer comes,” he quietly affirmed.

“That’s a very dangerous thing to say,” she reminded him. There was a note of indolence in her voice, but above all the vague indolence was some newer overtone of intensity.

“Everything is dangerous,” he averred, “when we are together like this.”

“That is one of the nicest things you have ever said to me.”

“It is not nice for me,” he said, avoiding her gaze.

“But you like me?” she persisted.

He did not answer her in words. But she read the answer in the slumberous and Indian-dark eyes which for a moment met hers. And for a moment she was almost afraid of them. But it was only for a moment.

“Then take me away from here,” she found the courage to say.

She could see, for all his quietness, the struggle that was taking place in that swarthy lithe body so close to her own.

“Take me anywhere,” she added, more abandonedly.

“That is impossible,” he finally affirmed.

And she was once more impressed by his remoteness, his almost animal-like self-estrangement.

“Then you don’t care?” she murmured, chilled by a cautiousness that was slightly unexpected.

“I am only an Indian,” he disappointed her by proclaiming.

“I know that,” she agreed, almost sharply. “But we’ve both a great deal to forget.”

“Some things,” he explained, “can’t be forgotten.” He found it easier to speak, apparently, when he was looking away from her.

“What things?” she demanded, her slightly hardened eyes on his averted face.

“Your father,” he explained, “is a strong man in this district. He could find many ways of making life uncomfortable for me.”

“Are you afraid of him?”

“I know the length of the bull-whip he can crack over the man who crosses him.”

“That sounds like paleface talk,” said the white woman, her lip slightly curled with scorn.

“To-day,” the other reminded her, “paleface talk rather rules the world.”

“But not your world.”

He stood, under her abstracted stare, less flashing and valorous and exotic than he had seemed. She became conscious of the shabbiness of his attire, the oddness of his foot-gear, the less resolute lines in the aquiline Indian face. She even found an air of pathos about him, the pathos of the misfit unable to fathom the source of his failure.

“I have two worlds,” he was saying to her.

“Then let’s go back to the real one.”

Still again he found it necessary to stand silent.

“You don’t know what that means.”

“I don’t care much. Wouldn’t you want me?”

“Rather,” was his answer.

And so modern and sophisticated did the solitary word sound that the ghost of a smile played about her lips.

“Wouldn’t you marry me?” she quietly inquired. Noting his hesitation, she added in a sharper note: “Well, why wouldn’t you?”

“There’s no one to do it,” he explained, “no one who would do it, within a hundred miles of where we are.”

“Why?”

“Your father has power,” was the answer.

And it caused Janet’s eyes to narrow.

“That’s what I hate about the whole thing,” she protested. “That’s what I’d fight against to the last ditch—the human right to live as I want to and not as somebody else says.”

“I tried that once,” said Black Arrow. “It didn’t work.”

Janet stared out over the lake. She noticed, as her gaze returned to his face, that he looked older, more time-scarred, than she had at first realized.

“Wouldn’t city life appeal to you?” she asked.

“It’s too late,” was the laconic reply, cutting short her vision of him in evening clothes, silent and dark and slightly mysterious at a dinner-party where her friends secretly waited to see if he carried a scalping-knife and ate with his hands. He failed, for some reason, to fit into the picture. He seemed best, after all, in his natural setting.

“Wouldn’t you even marry me in the Indian way?” she inquired with her self-defensive laugh. “That must have been good enough for most of your people. And it ought to be good enough for us.”

“We no longer marry that way,” he said, his somber eyes on her face.

“And you won’t marry me?”

“No!”

She could afford to smile at the unhappiness in his eyes. His skin was bronze, she told herself, but underneath that skin he couldn’t be so vastly different from other men. And he could claim a dignity that remained unshaken before even her irreverence.

“Will you take me away from here?” she demanded.

“Yes,” he said. And the solemnity of that reply brought a small and wayward thrill to her body.

“When?”

“When it can be done safely.”

“But why must we wait?”

“They would come after us,” he said out of the silence that had fallen over him.

“So much the better,” averred the white woman with the old hard light once more in her eyes.

But Black Arrow, at the moment, was not looking at her.

“And what would you do with me?” she questioned, puzzled by the second involuntary tingle that sped through her body.

“You would not stay with me,” he answered.

“What makes you say that?”

“I know.”

Her laugh had a touch of bitterness.

“Do you realize, Mr. Black Arrow, that you’re being disappointingly noble?”

He chose, for reasons of his own, to let that question remain unanswered.

“But if you take me away,” she persisted, “what will you do with me?”

“I am a good guide,” he proclaimed. “I will be a guide like that for a party of one.”

“At three dollars a day?” she mocked. But he seemed impervious to her taunts. And her brooding eyes became solemn again. “Well, that will be better than going alone. For I may as well tell you that I intend to go.”

“I know,” said Black Arrow.

“But you don’t seem very happy about it all.”

“I will be happy when I am with you,” he said with his aboriginal honesty.

“That sounds better,” she admitted. “And I suppose we can’t take very much with us?”

“Only what you need,” was his answer.

And this seemed to give her considerable to think over.

“I suppose we can live off the land?” she suggested. “Get what we want on the wing, so to speak?”

“If you are willing to live that way,” he conceded.

“You don’t seem very triumphant about it,” she demurred, still disturbed by the melancholy of the meditative dark face so close and yet so remote from her. “In fact, you seem more afraid of it all than I do.”

“Perhaps that’s because I have most to lose,” was his altogether unexpected reply. Her levity had quite failed to touch him. His face hardened at her quick and brittle laughter.

“So in this particular case it’s the poor man who pays and pays and pays!” cried the daughter of the Pulpwood King. “How wonderfully we’re turning the old-fashioned romances upside down! You may not know it, Black Arrow, but it used to be the woman who paid and paid and paid.”

“Perhaps she still can,” observed the Indian who had once studied at Oxford.

And as Janet, arrested by the quietness of his tone, stared up into the barricaded bronze face she harvested the impression that she, after all, was the primitive while he in turn was the child of timelessly accumulated tradition.

“Well, I’m not going to whimper over it,” proclaimed Janet, her levity vanishing in a characteristic flash of intensity.

Paddy had had a busy morning of it. She had swept and put the cabin to rights, had washed and dried her clothes in the sweetening summer sun, and, standing in a tub to protect her feet from faulty ax-strokes, had made a solemn effort to school herself in the art of chopping wood. After that, revolting against bannock, she had kneaded and baked three loaves of bread whose pale brown crust carried an aroma altogether satisfactory to her interrogatively sniffing young nose, whereupon she turned her attention to scaling and gutting a catch of fish which she strung out on Pierre’s crudely built smoke-frame and proceeded to dry over a slow-burning fire of bark and punkwood. And in these tasks, oddly enough, she was unexpectedly though meagerly happy. Even with Janet off for the day, fishing on the far side of the island, she was able to forget a loneliness that might otherwise have weighed heavily upon her. But there was a joy, she found, in this daily small battle for organization, in getting things clean, in the accumulation of stores against a vaguely threatening future, in remembering that she was functioning, however crudely, in a world where she had hitherto stood functionless.

Yet, contented as she appeared, her pulses quickened a little when, in the midst of her work, she heard the increasing low hum of a motor and looked up to see a wide-winged beetle bearing toward her in the cloudless azure sky. There was no longer room for loneliness in her heart as she saw the advancing seaplane veer and turn and drop lower, until the intervening spruce-tops cut it off from her vision.

But she knew by the sounds along the lake-shore that Casey Crowell was making a landing, that he would be there beside her, a helmeted messenger from the outer world, before she could get the fish-scales out of her hair and the gore-stains off her fore-arms.

But it didn’t much matter, she decided as she piled more bark on her smoke-frame fire. In that life, she remembered, she had few illusions to sustain. And when Casey came over the hill, with oil-stains on his flying-jacket and a smile on his wind-reddened young face, Paddy was still keeping a monitorial eye on her smoking fish. There was a smudge of soot on her cheek; her small hardened hand was soiled with dust and ashes.

“Hello, Indian!” he called out with his youthfully grim smile.

“Hello, cloud-dodger,” retorted Paddy.

“How goes it?” he asked with a purely paraded offhandedness.

“Swimmingly.” She, obviously, was not sorry to see him. “And with you?”

“I’m fired,” was his unexpected answer.

“Why?” she demanded.

“For breaking quarantine!”

“What does that mean?” demanded the girl with the soot-smudge on her cheek.

“Your father warned me that if I flew back to this island, I was no longer flying for his company.”

“Then what made you come?”

“You did,” was Casey’s prompt reply.

“Thanks,” said Paddy, with a quick look into his eyes. “But what’ll you do?”

Casey, after a casual look about the camp, let his glance return to the sunburned girl in moccasins.

“The Department of Railways and Canals is asking the Northwest Airways Company to link up their Hudson Bay road with Port Nelson and Fort Churchill this summer. That means survey and investigation work, besides carrying freight and passengers from Kettle Rapids up to the Bay. And I guess there’s room for me in that service.”

“But is that being fair to father?” asked Paddy.

Casey’s eyes, at that query, widened perceptibly.

“You don’t seem to want me around here,” he challenged.

“That isn’t the point,” retorted Paddy, frowning over her soiled hands. “It’s my father, apparently, who doesn’t want you around here.”

Casey looked out over the lake and the blue-misted hills beyond it.

“But your father’s trying to do something that can’t be done,” he finally protested. “He can’t keep men away from a girl like you. He can’t do it any more than he can keep bees away from a flower-garden.”

Paddy betrayed no outward signs of any inner emotion.

“Do I mean all that to you?” she said with self-protective cynicism.

And Casey, for a moment or two, found it rather hard to explain himself.

“You see,” he said without sign of guile or shame, “men want music in their lives. Some of them want it tremendously, but aren’t able to get it. Take me, for instance. This is pretty rough stuff I’m biting off now. There used to be a thrill to it, of course. But as you get older you lose that.”

“And?” prompted Paddy as she studied his shadowed face.

“There’s a steady ache that nothing seems to fill—you can say it’s for music or beauty or anything you like. But it’s there, and we can’t quite forget it.”

“And?” again prompted the impassive Paddy.

“You happen to mean in my life about what music does,” he said with an effort at casualness that fell short.

“But,” contended Paddy with her barricading frown, “we were talking about playing fair. And when we’ve something we’re expected to be loyal to, we ought to be loyal to it.”

Casey, as he lighted his pipe, seemed to be giving this considerable close thought.

“The trouble is in deciding just what you should be loyal to,” he observed, unexpectedly solemn. “But those were the things, I supposed, that you never thought much about.”

“I’ve been thinking about them a great deal,” protested the sober-eyed Paddy. “In fact, I’ve been trying to dry-clean my soul, and I’ve discovered that some of the spots don’t come off easily.”

He laughed at that, condoningly.

“I don’t think I’d want much change in you,” he averred.

“For that,” proclaimed Paddy, “I’m going to ask you to luncheon!”

“Thanks,” said Casey, ignoring both her shrug and her faint change of color. “Where’s your sister?”

“Knocking about the other side of the island somewhere. Would you like to see the bread I’ve made?”

“I’d rather eat it,” acknowledged the russet-browed youth as he followed her into the cabin. But Paddy, as she exhibited the three brown-crusted domes, was paying scant attention to her visitor’s sounds and signs of appreciation. For her wandering eye had seen, for the first time, an object of folded birch-bark pinned to the shack-wall just above Janet’s sleeping-bunk. The habitual small frown wrinkled her forehead as she stepped over to that unexpected missive. And her frown deepened as she took up the plaque of pale-tissued bark, unfolded it, and read the brief message thereon inscribed. She read it a second time, in fact, before the meaning of the hurriedly written words filtered through to her brain. And then she stood so blank-faced that Casey once more swung about and stared into her bewildered eyes.

“What is it?” he demanded.

She did not answer him by word of mouth. She merely held the oblong of birch-bark out for him to take.

“Dear Paddy,” he read aloud, “father seems determined to Indianize us, so I’m going to give him his money’s worth. I’m having Chief Black Arrow take me away. I don’t quite know where or what we’re headed for—but I’m at least on my way. There’s nothing to worry over, for whatever happens I don’t think I could be unhappier than I’ve been on Adanak Island. And if you’re in the business of being barbaric you may as well go the whole hog! At any rate, I’ve made my decision and Black Arrow seems willing. Jinny.”

Casey, as he put the oblong of bark down on the table-end, uttered a quiet but wicked word. Then he stared, blank-eyed, out through the open door.

“This is rather awful,” he said aloud.

Paddy, who had been making a quick assessment of Janet’s belongings, swung about on him with almost a show of anger.

“Why is it so awful?” she demanded.

“What do you know about this Indian who calls himself Chief Black Arrow?” he countered.

“What should I know?” demanded the girl.

Casey, apparently, found it hard to proceed.

“I guess there’s no use going into that now,” he evaded. “What we’ve got to do is get after them.”

But Paddy was obdurate. “What is Black Arrow?” she demanded.

“Frankly, he’s a good-for-nothing redskin. He boasts about having danced once with Lady Diana Manners and Irene Castle, but he’s willing to let a woman support him while he lives like a pig.”

“What woman supports him?”

“His wife, or his squaw, or whatever you want to call her.”

“Then he’s married?”

“Yes, to old Pierre Pecotte’s daughter, and with two or three little redskinned papooses around their camp to prove it. And that’s why it’s so awful.”

“How would his—his squaw support him?” demanded Paddy, her lower lip a trifle unsteady.

“In any way she could: making moccasins, sweet-grass baskets, hickory ax-handles, trapping, fishing. And while she does that, he smokes on a blanket and talks about the fancy polo he played before he went back to the feathers. For two-thirds of the year he won’t even live with her.”

“It is rather awful,” said Paddy, with a little wringing movement of the hands. “What can we do about it?”

“Did you ever fly?” asked Casey, following her out through the narrow doorway.

“Never.”

“Will you risk it?”

“Of course,” was her prompt reply. “But what can we do?”

“We’ve got to find them, and find them right away.”

“But which way would they go?”

Casey stood thinking this over.

“They started by canoe. They had to, from here. The natural inference is they’ll keep on that way. They’d never work back toward the rail-head. They’d go north, or northwest, for they’d want to get deeper into forest country. That means they’d go by the Washabo and Lac aux Loups or by the way of the Little St. Onge and Boiling River, if they stuck to the waterways.”

“And if they didn’t?” asked Paddy.

Casey’s face was grim.

“They could go a dozen different ways on land. And if they wanted to hide out, of course, we wouldn’t have one chance in a hundred of spotting them from the air.”

“You mean they’d always see us first?”

“Of course,” was Casey’s answer. “But they’d need fire now and then, as they go. And I’m a bit of a sniffer-hound for smoke in this territory.”

She was hurrying about, a moment later, as a result of his reminder that she would need warmer clothes. But she stopped suddenly in the midst of her search.

“Why not get Pierre?” she asked.

“Pierre’s a good trailer,” agreed Casey, “but he might not be as good a father-in-law. Let’s not drag him in until we have to. Are you ready?”

“All ready,” announced Paddy, as she swung shut the cabin door.

It was half-way to the water’s edge that Casey abruptly stopped.

“Would they strike down toward the railway?” he interrogated. “I mean, as you know and understand your sister, would she want to work her way back to civilization with this Indian?”

“When her Irish is up,” proclaimed Paddy, “Jinny would do anything.”

“But would she want to lead Black Arrow around Park Avenue like a tame bear?”

Paddy frowned over this problem.

“No, she’d never go to New York,” was her final decision.

“Are you sure?”

“Positive!”

“Then that simplifies things a little,” asserted Casey. “We’ll work out toward Big Squaw Lake.”

Paddy’s emotions, as she sat in the plane cock-pit and felt the first pulsations of the singing engine, were oddly mixed. Fear for herself, however, was scarcely one of them. What she was thinking about most was her father. “This will pretty well bowl the old boy over,” she muttered to herself. She was wondering if Casey was right in contending that he should not be sent for until they knew it was quite necessary. Then she wondered if Casey was right in his estimate of Black Arrow, asking herself if, with the arrogance of the white man, he wasn’t a trifle unjust to the redman who had lost rootage in both civilizations, who, if without anchorage, seemed also without enmity. Black Arrow, in fact, impressed her as an essentially tragic figure. Jinny hadn’t been as generous with that human derelict as she might have been. And this was a fine way to spill the beans, just as they were getting their second wind and showing they had some fight left in them. Not in the beans, of course, Paddy secretly amended, but in their rotten second-generation Winslow make-up.

By this time, however, Paddy was no longer thinking of herself. The boat had risen with a crescendo roar from the lake-water, tilting a little as it turned, and bringing home to the girl the fact that they were indeed flying. She could see, as she stared down from the narrow cock-pit, the world flattening out and dropping away from them. They were traveling now on steady wings, but it surprised her that they should climb so high. The wilderness, from that distance, seemed to lose its roughness. It spread out below them like the pile of dark-green velvet, softly furred with the close-packed spruce-tops, freckled here and there with pallid blue lakes and seamed with the narrow threads of its waterways. It looked oddly peaceful and untroubled and remote. It also looked empty, so empty that when Paddy’s eyes discovered a thin wisp of smoke drifting across the darker mottled green her pulse quickened and she cried aloud.

“That’s an old muskeg fire,” Casey shouted in her ear.

They were swinging back on their course in a wide arc, dropping a little as they went. Paddy, watching over the side, noticed how an occasional rock-ledge looked like cloth with the nap worn off and the hills and valleys looked like creases in carelessly folded green velour. And it seemed a very big world to the watching girl as she stared from one illimitable sky-line to the other, a pitilessly big and lonesome-looking world that could so easily swallow up its trivial atom of a human life. Her earlier mood of exhilaration passed away, in fact, as they doubled back and forth and dipped and circled, always studying the wrinkled dark landscape beneath them. When, a little later, they caught sight of a second wisp of smoke, Casey shook his head at her sudden excited gesture.

“That’s Black Arrow’s camp,” he shouted. “They couldn’t be there.”

She thought she saw a skirted figure moving about in the clearing, but she couldn’t be sure. A little later she thought she recognized Lake Wapanapi as they veered and circled over a darker green body of water with a broken-lined island in its center. And her earlier feeling of homelessness slipped away from her as they sank still lower and swung about once more into the wind as the world came up to meet them and she realized the fact that they were taxying in toward Adanak Island.

“You’re not giving up?” she demanded of Casey as he pulled off his helmet and they drifted in toward the shore-line.

“Not by a long shot,” he said. He sat scowling for a moment into the strong sunlight. “But I think we ought to send for your father.”

“You mean you’re afraid of what may happen?” asked Paddy, trying to control her voice.

“Not necessarily. But if we’re going to carry on a search we’ve got to get properly organized for it.”

Paddy tried to picture her father when that message was carried out to him. It was not a pleasant scene to contemplate.

“They may come back?” she ventured.

“We can’t wait for that,” asserted Casey as he helped her ashore and made fast his mooring lines. And Paddy’s face, as she paced slowly up and down the sun-warmed sand, was heavy with unhappiness.

“This does seem like giving poor Dad a dose of his own medicine,” she said as Casey joined her. “I hate to have a message like that go out to him.”

“Wouldn’t you rather he knew?” demanded Casey.

“Not unless it’s necessary,” she told him.

“But it’s that already,” contended Casey, his gaze directed along the wooded shore-line. Then he turned back to the girl at his side. “Under the circumstances, this will be a good time to take you out. It’s doubly plain now that this isn’t the right place for a white woman.”

“And it’s not a time to show the white feather,” retorted Paddy.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Simply that I’m going to stay here until we find Jinny,” said the girl with the sun-darkened face.

It was old Pierre who appeared at the island cabin early the next morning. He came before Paddy had finished a lonely and altogether unsatisfactory breakfast, and his non-committal eye was not long in taking in several altered aspects of the camp. But he stood silent, with no change on his seamed old face. And Paddy, equally silent, stood regarding his barricaded eye.

“Have you seen Jinny?” she finally inquired.

“No see um,” was Pierre’s quiet reply.

“She has gone,” explained Paddy, with a sense of inadequacy. “She has run away.”

Even to that Pierre ventured no reply.

“She has run away with Black Arrow,” announced the girl, nettled by the other’s sustained apathy. Still Pierre betrayed no emotion. Even his first movement, when it came, was a small one.

“Um go,” he said with a glance toward the remoter shore-line.

His intentions, however, were not clear to Paddy.

“You mean us?” she demanded, with a finger pointed toward herself.

“Yum,” was Pierre’s emotionless reply. And that, Paddy knew, meant “yes.” But a frown of doubt clouded her face as she studied the stoop-shouldered old figure. He seemed too aged, too stooped and decrepit, for adventuring through an unknown wilderness. Everything, after all, would depend on him; and if he failed her in those empty and unmapped outlands it would mean prompt disaster to them both. And it wouldn’t be long, now, before Casey and his plane were back.

“Do you know this country?” she demanded.

The ghost of a smile flickered for a moment about the flaccid old lips.

“Um know him,” was the quiet reply. And Paddy, at that, remembered that he would naturally know a district where he must have lived as man and boy for some seventy odd years. Perhaps even more than that, she amended. It was, after all, his home and the home of his ancestors, the land from which he had wrung his meager living and the forest-lore that lay behind those faded old eyes which could see so much unseen by the eyes of others.

“When should we start?” she asked with a responsive calm of her own.

“Now,” was the answer.

“But how would we travel?” asked the girl. “How would we go?”

“Canoe,” was the brief reply.

“All right,” she agreed, coming to a quick decision. “What should we take?”

They would travel light, she was told, taking only a blanket and flour and tea and bacon. And they would go in Pierre’s canoe, taking a second paddle for Paddy’s use, since time was a factor and every stroke was a help.

She was ready in half an hour, with a note explaining her absence pinned on the shack door, with what clothes she needed tied up in a burlap towel, and with an odd sense of relief at finding herself an active agent in the search. The one point she hesitated over was in deciding about taking a shotgun. A weapon, she remembered, would give her a certain sense of security, in the open. But a gun, she also remembered, might not be the best thing in the world for old Pierre to have at his elbow, should they unexpectedly meet up with his son-in-law. The old fellow seemed to have no fire-arms of his own. Yet she had once thought of Indians as being weaned on rifles and sleeping on mattresses of muzzle-loaders.

So when she saw Pierre studying her as she studied the duck-gun, she politely assumed an air of indifference.

“No need um,” the Indian curtly informed her.

She went forth, accordingly, without her trusty weapon. From that hour forward, indeed, she surrendered unreservedly to Pierre’s guidance. She had no inkling of his intentions, but she bowed to them. She had no knowledge of the course he took, but she accepted it without question. Whatever the processes of thought behind his movements, whatever the motives prompting him to one turn and then another, they remained stolidly unexplained. The weather was hot and dry; the refracted sunlight burned with a double edge on the unweathered skin of the white girl; and the business of paddling, she found, could be both monotonous and tiring.

But Paddy proffered no complaints. They quartered across the open lake, threaded a flotilla of small islands, and found themselves in a narrow river between rocky shores. Her blood chilled as she heard the roar of a rapids close before them and she held her breath as the fragile birch-bark went dancing down a flumeway of white water spotted with moss-green boulders. Yet once they had dipped down into the boiling “cellar” and cut through the wavering wall of mist and emerged again into quiet water freckled with foam, an unexpected sense of exhilaration took possession of her. She had, in this, stumbled on a new form of experience. She had been daring, all her life, but this was a new kind of daring. It was better than doing fifty miles an hour in an underslung roadster. It was next to flying. It was something cleansing to torpid souls, as cleansing as a header from a thirty-foot diving-platform. It vindicated, in obscure ways of its own, her challenged right to live.

When they came to a fork in the channel and Pierre unhesitatingly swung to the left, the girl glanced back with a frown of perplexity.

“Why did you come this way?” she asked.

To this, however, the old Indian proffered no reply.

“Why are we going this way?” she repeated.

“Me know,” he said, his deep-set eyes swerving from bank to bank as they surged forward. And inadequate as it was, Paddy accepted it as satisfactory.

When they stopped abruptly and landed on a gently sloping bank fringed with white birch, the girl looked questioningly about for some shadow of reason for that side-movement. But she could see nothing.

She followed Pierre, however, up over a ridge of rock and along what seemed a narrow trail through the scattered pines. When she saw the old Indian stop for the second time and scrutinize the softer ground at his feet she suddenly realized the meaning of that movement. For even her untrained eye could make out foot-marks there, one small and one large, one light and one heavy.

“Him portage here,” proclaimed Pierre with a quiet grunt of satisfaction. And that sign brought the fugitives suddenly closer to the startled Paddy.

Yet it troubled her, as they followed their course over that twisted portage, to see the bent old figure of her guide burdened with the weight of the overturned canoe. It seemed too much for a man of his years. But he strode ahead, stolidly enough, oblivious of even the bush-flies and mosquitoes that clustered about his leathery old neck. He was, in fact, anything but a romantic figure. He looked rather ridiculous in his sodden and ragged store-clothes, looked uncommonly like a mummy unexpectedly galvanized into life. But the bewildered girl realized, as they took up the trail again, that he was both an adept and an expert at the work in hand. She realized this still again when they stopped to eat and without one wasted movement Pierre built his fire and cooked the meal and pushed off into an unknown river that seemed winding into the unknown recesses of an empty world.

Late that afternoon they stopped again, without apparent rhyme or reason, and Pierre landed to investigate a rock-floored clearing beside a cluster of birches. He stayed so long that Paddy, growing impatient, was prompted to climb the broken bank and join him. She found him stooped over a small pile of ashes, a small pile of ashes as gray as the rock on which they lay.

“Was this their fire?” she asked. Her voice, she noticed, was lowered, moderated to the tone in which one unconsciously speaks of the dead.

Pierre said, “Yum.” Then he pointed to a near-by cluster of spruce-boughs, neatly feathered.

“What’s that for?” she demanded.

“Bed,” was the laconic reply. And Paddy stared down at it with a wordless heaviness about her heart.

“Who slept there?” she asked.

“White woman,” was Pierre’s answer. He seemed more interested, at the moment, in the open space on the far side of the fire-ashes. “Him sleep here,” proclaimed the old man, pointing to the ground at his feet.

“Oh!” was all Paddy said.

“Him walk up an’ down,” added Pierre, with a gnarled finger directed toward the telltale footprints. “Walk up an’ down big heap.”

And again Paddy merely said “Oh!” But her eyes remained thoughtful as they returned to the canoe and once more took up their journey.

They did not camp, that night, until the late northern evening was deepening into darkness. And they were astir the next morning long before the sun was up over the hilltops. Paddy remembered falling asleep beside a birch-fire, with the smell of wood-smoke and Pierre’s bad tobacco in her nostrils. She knew nothing more until she felt a tug at her blanket and sat up to see a rind of thin silver above the spruce-tops and the copper tea-pail boiling on the near-by fire.

And in half an hour they were on the wing again, threading their way along devious waterways, traversing loon-haunted lakes, swinging down amber-tinted rapids crowned with mist. Sometimes they saw game as they went and once Paddy caught sight of a brown bear scuffling off through the littoral underbrush. Once, too, they met a solitary Indian in a birch-bark canoe, a canoe even more battered and patched than Pierre’s, and for several minutes the two bronze-skinned figures conferred together. They talked quietly enough, in a tongue of their own, and as quietly resumed their paddling.

“Has he seen anything of them?” demanded Paddy.

“No see um,” was Pierre’s stolid response. Her spirits sagged, at that, for with the growing comprehension of the immensity of the forest-land about them came a growing conviction that the chase was a blind one.

“But are we going the right way?” demanded the girl as she rested her arms from paddling. The sun overhead was hot on her skin; there were blisters on her hands; and her legs were cramped. She felt unnaturally old and experienced, as battered and time-worn as the canoe in which she sat.

“We get um,” was Pierre’s placid retort. And that afternoon the fugitives were brought closer again when Pierre, making one of his abrupt landings, pointed out to her the ashes of a second camp-fire. She began to wonder, none-the-less, why there was no sound of Casey’s plane across the robin-egg sky, why they were so slow in coming, why her father should let precious hour by hour slip by. She wondered, too, how long it could keep up, how deep she and Pierre dare venture into that terra incognita of pine and lake and muskeg and rock-ridge. And what would she do, she demanded of herself, if anything should happen to Pierre? She would be helpless there, utterly lost in a wilderness where one blue-clad vista looked so much like another. Her food would give out, and her moccasins would fall apart, and her clothes would get torn away, and then she would curl up and die and Casey would find a little pile of bones beside a jack-pine, a little pile of bones picked as clean as a skeleton on a museum shelf. And that pile of bones would be Her, would be all that was left of Her, Patience Margaretta Winslow, once known to her friends as Paddy. And she wondered if Casey would feel sorry and if he would think kindly of her and if he would know and understand that she wasn’t so empty-headed and worthless as she had once pretended to be?

But Pierre, she contended, was a tough and leathery old Indian who seemed placidly at home in such surroundings and would probably live to be a hundred. And the warm blood of youth still rang singing in her veins and she was absurdly hungry and eager for supper and there were a great many things she wanted to live for.

“Pierre,” she said a little later beside their supper-fire, grateful for even that attenuated companionship, “you’re certainly a great old scout!”

Pierre’s reply to that demonstration, however, was nothing more than a grunt. And in half an hour they were both asleep under the serene northern stars.

Yet before the sun was up they were on their way again, winding through a chain of island-dotted lakes and portaging over a sparsely treed neck of land where Pierre still again pointed out the tracks of the two fugitives. To Paddy, as she stared down at them, they looked disturbingly companionable, those smaller footprints beside the larger. They looked friendly and audacious and unreckoning. And by noon, when the pursuers came to the third camping-spot, beside a slow-winding river fringed with spruce-land, Paddy noticed that Pierre thrust his hand into the little ash-heap, to see if there were still any warmth at its center.

“Are we that close to them?” she asked, buoyed up by the promise of their nearness.

“Mebbe,” was Pierre’s non-committal reply. But during the next half-hour he quartered back and forth about the clearing and the spruce groves beyond it, like a fox-hound sniffing after a lost scent.

“What’s the matter?” demanded Paddy when he came back to the beached canoe. But Pierre, deep in his own thoughts, proffered no immediate reply to that question.

“What’s the matter?” repeated the girl, conscious of the deepened frown on the seamed old face.

“Um no go on,” proclaimed Pierre, staring into the gloom of the spruce-lands.

“You mean Black Arrow hasn’t gone on?” asked the girl.

“Him go on,” acknowledged the old Indian.

“And what about Jinny?” she demanded.

“Um go back,” averred Pierre. But Paddy, apparently, found the situation beyond her comprehension.

“You don’t mean that my sister, that Jinny, has gone back alone?” she asked, trying to keep the quaver out of her voice.

Pierre nodded assent. Yet the frown remained on his time-furrowed old face.

“But what could make her?” cried Paddy. “And where could she go? And what could she do?”

Pierre, obviously, had no answer for these questions. And Paddy, standing straight and slender in the flat sunlight, tried to shut out the picture of a lost and famished white woman fighting her way through a tangled and pathless wilderness.

“She would die,” the girl said under her breath. “She would surely die!”

“Him take canoe,” Pierre was explaining, with a gesture toward the river. And that, to Paddy, made it worse than ever. It implied that Jinny was alone in the forest, floundering about on foot, skirting sloughs and muskegs that could suck a human body into their depths without a sound.

“Can’t we find her, Pierre?” cried the girl with the tragically clouded eyes.

“Mebbe,” acknowledged the old Indian, already intent on caching the canoe high above the water-line.

“But we must,” protested Paddy as she kneeled to tie their duffel into a pack. “We must!”

“Bush heap big,” asserted Pierre as he retied the pack and swung it over his bent shoulders. That burden, in some way, tended to accentuate the impression of his age. He seemed an incredibly wasted and wrinkled old man. He seemed, with his dissimulative air of decrepitude, a pathetically frail and foolish leader in such an adventure. And Paddy, with a sudden lump in her throat, turned her gaze from the bent-legged old Indian to the high-arching blue sky over her head.

“I wish to God that Casey and Dad would get here!” she cried aloud. And that cry wasn’t altogether irreverent. It was, in fact, almost a prayer.

Janet, as she sat in the bow of the canoe facing the paddler, found herself uncomfortably comfortable. The canoe-bottom was padded with a folded tarpaulin and her back rested against her blanket-roll and when she tired of one position she could change to another. The ripple of the water against the pointed bow and the rhythmic swing of the paddle was like a narcotic, making it hard for her to keep her lids from drooping and her head from nodding.

That, she suddenly told herself, was the trouble. She was not in the part. She was too passive a factor in the entire adventure. She was unparticipating and indolent and self-immured, like a cat on a sunny window-seat. Yet she was supposed to be running away from the world. She had scuttled her ship of life. She was throwing her cap over the windmill. Yet in the very midst of this adventure she was finding it very hard to keep her eyes open. And that meant something amiss, something wrong.

It had been a mistake, she felt, to sit facing Black Arrow. He was an Indian, and called himself a chief. But there was, momentarily, little that was regal in his appearance. Who, in fact, could spot romance in a gondolier under a well-patched plaid shirt, a pair of grease-stained corduroy trousers held up by a beaded belt from which most of the beads had been shed, and a pair of worn moccasins that curled up at the toes and retained an unmistakably creosotic smell? He couldn’t have looked that way, she felt, when he was hobnobbing with the crowned heads of Europe. And he must have had a much cleaner shirt on when he danced with Lady Diana Manners, and a slightly different aroma when he was week-ending with the Duchess of Sutherland.

Yet it was catty, she told herself a moment later, to let her mind run along such lines. And one owed something to a man who was generous enough to abduct one. The trouble, she suspected, lay in her own softness. She, always, had merely played at being primitive. She had modified the monotony of luxury by reaching languidly out for an occasional touch of the aboriginal, by reverting to candles and open fires and unpainted hickory furniture and genteelly barbaric picnics amid the ants and bugs of the Berkshire Hills. But she hadn’t been fashioned for a child of Nature. Her feet weren’t the right shape for the wearing of moccasins. She couldn’t get used to the feeling of rough clothes against her flesh, and a rough blanket to sleep on, and rough towels to rub dry with. Peter had once said that people really have five skins. If that was true, she was surely going about with only four.

Jinny, as she lounged back in the canoe-bow and studied her companion with a new intentness, noticed for the first time the beads of sweat on his face, the sweat of monotonous toil. Yes, it had been a mistake to sit facing him, hour after hour, with so little to do and so much to think about. She should have brought a second paddle along and taken a more active part in that flight of defiance, her forward-looking gaze on every island and headland and bayou and river-bend as they met it. It was altogether too much like sitting beside one’s taxi-driver. But even as she felt vaguely grateful for his silence, for a natural dignity which his ridiculous clothes could not entirely neutralize, she remembered that this silence was bastioned in the abysmal gulfs of habit and race that yawned between them. And she had a feeling of being cheated, of carrying home a frock which, after the brief thrill of acquisition, could never be worn in public.

Yet she wanted to be just to Black Arrow. For he, on his part, had been unexpectedly just with her. He was, in that way, one man in a thousand. His father’s father had probably scalped and quartered white women. But he had ceremoniously gone off to pick raspberries for their breakfast while she had washed at the water’s edge. His savoir-vivre was more than diverting; it could be a trifle disturbing. And he could be made, she decided, rather ornamental. He had a line to his shoulder that was worth the right sort of tailor. But he would be a trifle too exotic for every-day use. He even reminded her of wood, of beautifully grained wood, slightly damaged with dry-rot.

“Black Arrow,” she asked with a listless sort of candor, “what spoiled you?”

“Am I spoiled?” he countered, darkening, with the quickness of a child, under the shadow of her disapproval.

“Yes; in a way you are,” she contended. “And I’ve been wondering what caused it.”

“Alcohol and England,” was his unexpectedly laconic reply.

She smiled at that, and then grew sober again.

“Why include England?” she inquired.

“They rather take to odd specimens from the frontier, over there. And the odder they are to look at the more they want to lionize them.”

“And many beautiful ladies wanted you to put on your war-bonnet and run away with them?”

He stiffened, perceptibly, at the derisive tone in her voice.

“I met many very charming women,” he said with a hauteur that did not go well with his habiliments of the moment.

“Were they nicer than me?” she demanded.

“Some of them,” he countered, “were kinder.”

“Undoubtedly,” agreed the solemn-eyed white woman. “And playing around with the queens of Mayfair would naturally unsettle you for a teepee mate. What you really should have done, Black Arrow, was to marry one of them and settle down on a Devonshire estate and show the parish school-children that you didn’t actually grow feathers.”

“I’d prefer talking about other things,” he said with his quiet and inalienable dignity.

And silence hung between them as they threaded their way through a parliament of bird-haunted islands crowned with pointed Jack-pines.

“I’m an awful rotter,” said Jinny as she shifted her position in the canoe-bottom. Then she fell to studying her hands, reddened and hardened by wilderness life. Having sighed over them, she looked down at her knees, above the rabbit-skin leggings which she had worn out of deference to Black Arrow’s wishes. They made her think of a Boy Scout’s legs, roughened by wind and water and darkened by the sun.

“Couldn’t you take me to a beauty-parlor somewhere?” she listlessly demanded.

“You’re in one,” was Black Arrow’s retort.

“You mean the simple life should bring the shy roses back to my cheeks?”

“It’s a good life for the people who’ve learned to accept it.”

There was an acid note in her laughter.

“It seems to take time.”

“And something more than time!”

“What?”

Black Arrow’s paddle dipped, steady stroke by stroke.

“The wish to go back to it,” was his quietly spoken reply.

“Well, I’m on my way,” announced the white woman as she trailed her fingers listlessly in the amber-tinted water.

When they bivouacked that noon beside a scattering grove of slender white birches that looked like a thousand young Dianas leaning slender-waisted against the wind, Jinny continued to watch Black Arrow as he chopped and cooked and made ready their meal. He did it with the inexplicable adroitness of the Indian, without a wasted movement or word. Yet she stood suddenly dismayed by his very efficiency. He was, after all, a sort of servant, an adeptly trained servant. Back in her old world he would probably be officiating in a butler’s pantry; he would be cooking over a kitchen-range; he would be a submerged and sexless machine in a service uniform and a sedulously maintained mask of impersonality. He had carefully washed at the river-side, she noticed, before he set about preparing their meal. But she shuddered a little as she saw him eating his sliced bacon with his fingers. It may have been the way of the North, but it was not lovely to the eye. It was foolish, of course, but she couldn’t help it. He was still a son of the desert. But his solemnity began to annoy her. And she would have preferred him in fresh linen and without residuary traces of pork-grease about his lips. For his face, she studiously observed, was itself little darker than a home-smoked side of bacon. And as he helped her into the canoe again she became conscious of an axillary odor that had hitherto escaped her attention.

She even experienced her own mood of silence as they struck deeper and deeper into that balsam-scented wilderness which unrolled so endlessly before their endlessly purling canoe-bow. She found a certain monotony in their course, in the same crooked little lakes that looked so much like rivers and the even more crooked rivers that had the habit of hiding their openings ahead and looking perversely like lakes, in the same portaging across rough and narrow forest-paths, in the same rock-gray headlands and spruce-slopes where the eternally marching trees, the solemnly regimented trees, pointed their army of fixed bayonets to the sky as they paraded across the ever-recurring hills crowned with their mist of horizon-blue.

Black Arrow looked his best, she found, when he was running a rapid, when he was thinking of his work and not of himself, when he was squatted tense and attentive as they swept down a boiling canyon stippled with rock-fangs. For she could not always forget that he was slightly histrionic. She had discovered that fact on the first night, when, after preparing her bed and mosquito-bar, he had solemnly placed her loaded gun close beside her back-folded blanket. That gesture, all things considered, had impressed her as a trifle theatrical. But she had ignored it. And now, in the ebb-tide of all her earlier insurrectionary valor, she was tempted to smile at it. She more and more thought of him as something a trifle soft and run-to-seed, left invertebrate by a civilization that had rejected him. She had a teasing wish to look upon him as a redskinned Leather-stocking, yet she found it hard to fancy him as much given to the use of fire-arms. He would look good on a horse, perhaps, but she could not shut out from her mind’s eye the picture of him posing before a grand-stand full of rodeo-fans, his mouth appropriately drawn down and his bony face becomingly hardened, while the cameras clicked and the prairie belles clapped their hands.

She forgot, on the whole, a cavern or two that yawned beyond the flat rock-wall of his Indian reticence, just as she seemed to forget his faded record from the Western Front and that souring isolation of soul which left him romantically eager to catch at the warmer coloring of life.

Yet the knowledge of something unexplored in his make-up came abruptly home to her when they landed late that afternoon and looked about for a camping-spot. Black Arrow happened to have the rifle in his hand as he preceded her up a pine-stubbled rock-slope, and when he unexpectedly stopped, stood tense, and then subsided full length along the moss-cushioned incline, she thought that he had suddenly fallen ill. He neither spoke nor moved, and she even garnered the somewhat absurd impression, as she stared at him, that he was melting and mingling into the rocky bed that supported him. Then she inferred that he had just as suddenly gone mad, for as she stood arrested by the eager malignancy of his face she realized that he had his rifle leveled and that he was shooting it off into empty space. Her suspicions grew firmer in texture, in fact, as she saw him spring to his feet and go running off like a madman through the underbrush.

When he came back to her, it was with a dead fawn drooping over his shoulder. It hung there limp, dripping blood from its pale-furred breast. And when he flung it down, not without a grunt of triumph, she thought she could see a look of reproof in the little creature’s glazed eyes.

“Why did you do that?” she gasped as she stooped and stroked the downy fur, stroked it pityingly, shudderingly.

“We’re short of meat,” he told her as he took out his knife.

“But it’s so cruel!” she cried, feeling a little faint.

Black Arrow turned over the carcass.

“It’s no cruder than getting spring lamb from the stockyards,” he said, slitting open the limp belly, “only you don’t happen to be in on the killing.”

“Oh, it’s cruel!” she repeated, drawing her hands down over her face.

“All life is that way,” proclaimed Black Arrow as he went on with his work.

“But isn’t it out of season?” she asked. “Isn’t it against the law to kill an animal like this?”

“There’s no law here,” he reminded her, “but the law of hunger.”

She stared at him, stunned and wide-eyed, like a flat-dweller whose purring house-cat has just eaten a canary.

“It’s hateful,” she said with her hands clenched.

“It makes good eating,” the other reminded her.

“Not for me,” she protested, still shuddering.

Yet she watched him, grimly, as he skinned and dressed and quartered the carcass. She watched him as he washed the pallid flesh and poised it on green wood sticks above his waiting bed of coals. It seemed to be weeping into the fire that darkened and shriveled it into something no longer resembling the bounding and leaping life it had been one short hour before. And Black Arrow, when they sat down to their meal, looked repugnant to her as he squatted on a windfall with a hunk of the slightly charred meat in his hands. He was eating with the silent and dogged industry of a hungry man, but he seemed neolithic to the tense-nerved white woman who sat watching him. He seemed as remote in time and space as something that had stepped out of the Stone Age.

“You ought to eat,” Black Arrow reminded her.

“I’m not a squaw yet,” she announced with a shrill bitterness that startled even her own ears.

She remembered, the next day, how Black Arrow had said that no one could stand with a foot on two different worlds. She was inclined to believe him. There were gulfs that could not be easily bridged. And she was not made for acrobatics. For she began to feel a trifle tired of dead spruce sprawling along stony shore-lines, of stunted jack-pine and Cambrian hog-backs, and black bass leaping for flies, and white birches that looked like tombstones starving to death. She was becoming a trifle tired of sun and water and a canoe that was not so dry between the ribs as it might have been. She felt an impatience to be on her feet, to pace well-trodden paths, to hear once more about her the companionable noises of the city, to break the anesthetic woodland silences with sudden shouts of derision.

“Where are we going?” she abruptly inquired of Black Arrow as she looked about at the slow-lengthening afternoon shadows.

“Across the Height of Land,” he answered, without a pause in his paddling.

“Do you know that country?” she inquired, dipping her handkerchief of unhemmed plane-linen in the water and spreading it over her sunburned fore-arm.

“Not where we’re going,” he explained.

“Shouldn’t you?” she demanded.

His smile was slightly remote.

“Indians aren’t really the travelers they’re supposed to be. Especially the wood Indians. They pretty well stick to their own territory. But we won’t find much change in this country for the next two or three hundred miles.”

She tried to hide her shudder. She looked over her shoulder toward the blue-misted pinelands stretching tier by tier into the indecipherable distance. She wondered why, at that moment, she should think of the pleasantly crowded Plaza tea-room and the flashing cars circling in to Pierre’s striped-awnings and the pulsating double-stream of afternoon automobiles winging their way so valiantly along the islanded shrubbery of Park Avenue. She could hear, above the murmur of flowing water, the less liquid murmur of an afternoon city in the kindly golden haze born of its very hurry. And the woman leaning back against the blanket-roll experienced a sudden and an absurd and inconquerable homesickness for that welter of life which had been known to her as civilization.

It seemed to come unheralded, as abrupt as a bullet. But it was the flowering, she knew, of forces that had been industriously at work below the surface of consciousness. She even thought of Peter, dependable Peter, good old Peter, once more catching her up on the wing and hustling her out to the Claremont for dinner, where he’d warn her not to smoke so much and lecture her about keeping better hours, and find his customary diatribe against night-clubs cut short by a telephone-call from St. Matthew’s Hospital, and have no time to finish his coffee and do more than pack her off in a taxi and tell her that a doctor’s life was the life of a dog. Peter was too busy, she remembered, just as she had been too idle. And if he met her at the next portage as she stepped out of Black Arrow’s canoe he would call her a neurotic young idiot who was still rattling the cage of life and proclaiming that she couldn’t be tamed.

It was that night, as Black Arrow was busy preparing her sleeping-place, that some small but growing discontent sought to express itself. Janet sat beside the fire of birch-wood as the late northern evening turned into night. She sat with a cloudy eye, staring at the flames in which a night-moth fluttered and fell.

“We don’t seem to be getting much out of this, do we?” she suddenly said out of the silence.

Black Arrow stopped in the act of laying out her mosquito-bar.

“I’m getting all I expected,” he surprised her by saying.

“But you’re giving up so much,” she objected.

“I’m not complaining,” was his non-committal reply.

“No, you wouldn’t, of course,” she agreed. “And that’s one thing I admire you for, tremendously.” She seemed to find it hard to go on. “You know, Black Arrow, I haven’t been entirely honest with you.”

“We haven’t been entirely honest with each other,” was the reply which reminded her that after all he was something more than an untutored savage.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because, when you say you want to turn back, I’ll have to say that it’s too late.”

“But I haven’t said I wanted to go back.”

“You will,” proclaimed Black Arrow.

“What makes you think so?”

“Because you’re not happy.”

“Are you?” countered the white woman.

“Much happier than I deserve to be,” was Black Arrow’s answer. And a new dignity fell about him, standing straight in the firelight. “I wanted to be with you. I wanted to be near you and help you. And I’m willing to pay the price.”

“What price?”

“I may have seen a bit more of the world than most Indians, but in the eyes of the law I’m still an Indian. And in this country, as your people would put it, the Indian has to watch his step.”

She laughed, in spite of herself, at the modernity of that phrase. Yet she was afraid of her own humor, at the moment; she was afraid of her own salvaging sense of humor, that inner illuminating mind-machinery with the power of changing perspectives as promptly as an electrician’s hidden lights can change values and vistas on a stage.

“You know, Black Arrow, this is really the oldest and tritest thing in all the world—a redman of the wilds carrying off a white woman! Why, that’s exactly what we gasped over when we couldn’t quite spell out all the hard words. And yet we’ve both done considerable reading in our time.”

Black Arrow’s face hardened.

“It is not a thing to laugh over,” he reminded her.

“Are you afraid?”

“Aren’t you?”

“But, Black Arrow, you’ve been simply irreproachable,” the languidly smiling woman reminded him.

“Perhaps not so much that way as you imagine,” was his slightly embittered response.

“Why do you say that?”

He stood silent a moment.

“I don’t suppose it makes much difference, now, but I’m already a married man.”

Janet sat silent a moment. Then a small and contemplative “Oh!” escaped her lips. But as she sat wrapped in a second silence her face took on a new hardness.

“To a white woman?” she finally asked.

“No, to one of my own people,” he answered.

“To whom?”

“To one of old Pierre’s daughters.”

She preferred not to look at him.

“And does that mean you have a family?”

“There are three children,” he admitted.

“Where are they?”

“At my camp, a few miles in from Wapanapi.”

“Oh!” repeated the white woman beside the fire. And this time there was a faint tinge of horror in her oddly prolonged cry. A vague tinge of color, at the same time, crept slowly up into her face.

“It’s rather an awful mess, isn’t it?” she said a little later, but she said it more to herself than to her companion. She was inured, in one way, to the insurrectionary adventures of her kind, to the careless audacities of a generation that turned no ear to the voice of authority. But, undefined as it was, she had her own phantasmal code of sportsmanship.

And as she sat in the dwindling firelight she became disturbingly conscious of a new ignominy, a final collapse of dignity. She drew, in her mind’s eye, a picture of an Indian wigwam, a wigwam housing three ragged Indian children and a copper-colored Indian woman, probably running to fat. That, she told herself, was the home she had disrupted. That fat squaw was the claimant, the legal claimant, to her knight of the woods.

It was more than ludicrous; it was hopelessly sordid and mean and unsavory. She had thought only of herself, of her own futile and foolish passion to escape. She had carried that corroding selfishness of hers even into the clean air of the wilderness.

Janet didn’t sleep that night. The woods were very still. She could even hear Black Arrow, rolled in his blanket under a distant jack-pine, placidly and gently snoring. He had paddled long and worked hard and earned his rest. And she no longer smiled at his absurd respect for her privacy. His retreat to the outer fringe of their camp-circle, night by night, had at first impressed her as faintly servile, as vaguely suggestive of the hired laborer instinctively retiring to his servants’ quarters. But she now detected something deeper in that movement. And she was grateful for it, as grateful as she had been when her after-theater party had been caught in a road-house raid and a colored cook’s helper had piloted her out through a kitchen passageway to a shadowy avenue of parked cars and eventual freedom.

But from this darker adventure she had not yet fought her way out to freedom. Yet the only way out, as far as she could see, was in flight. She could never go on. She must go back. She had wanted to prove her power, to show her strength, and the only thing she had shown was her weakness. Poor old Peter had been right, after all. It’s making the landing, he had warned her, that invariably bothers the high-fliers. And after stunting so showily along the airy sky-line of her selfishness, she had crashed, had crashed with the double shame of the scorner of older heads while her battered pride lay writhing in that burning fuselage.

There could be no redeeming touch of dignity, she knew, in her return. All she could salvage out of that wreck was her own tired body. And back with her, of course, she could never take Black Arrow. That would seem too much like capitulation, too much like penitents returning for forgiveness. And it was scarcely in her power, if she wished it. For in Black Arrow himself was a strain of pride that would make him intractable, that would leave him rather blind to reason. He might not be willing to surrender her to the wilderness, but he would never take her entirely back. And the best way to cut the knot was to cut it then and there, at a stroke. She would leave him. She would slip quietly away in the night and in doing so solve the whole problem. That alone would leave him free to go his own way and pave the path for his eventual return. That alone would make the situation comprehensible to others. To that extent, at least, she could make amends. She owed it to him.

There was little, after all, to be afraid of. He had explained to her more than once that these northern woods held no wild animal dangerous to the casual traveler. Their outward journey, so far, had been tranquil enough. It might take a little longer, to go back on foot, but she could follow the water-courses and bear always to the southwest. And with her she could carry her gun and blanket and a knife and a trolling-spoon, so that she could pick up food on the way, if her own rations of bacon and bannock ran low. She might even shoot a deer, a young deer with glazed and gently reproving eyes, for life, she remembered, had the habit of taming the unruly. And if she knew hardship and loneliness and discomfort she would have to face the fact that she deserved them, that she was paying the customary price for her moment of folly.

She sat up in the quietness and listened to the vague night-noises of the northern wilderness. It was not entirely dark, even then, and in an hour or two it would be light again. But if Black Arrow knew, she reminded herself, he would surely never let her go. So she would have to be very quiet about it all, she admonished herself as she slipped out of her blanket and listened and moved guardedly about in the gloom.

She paused, from time to time, as she cautiously gathered together what she needed, and, remembering how Black Arrow had made a pack-roll, tied it snugly up in her folded blanket and adjusted it to her shoulders. It seemed heavier than she expected, but that, she again reminded herself, would be part of her punishment. She felt the need of matches. But Black Arrow alone carried them and she realized the impossibility of creeping to his side and appropriating enough for her own use. She could get fire from one of her gun-shells, if the worst came to the worst, as Paddy had done that second day on their island. But at most she would be only a few days in the open. Already, she felt, they must be out searching for her. And at any hour she might see Casey’s plane in the sky or hear Paddy’s sturdy “Halloo!” through the woods. She hadn’t, on the whole, been quite fair with Paddy. But she had learned her lesson now, and there would be time enough to put that straight. Paddy was a good little scout. She had played the game and played it fairly. And it was about time some one else did the same.

Janet, as she stooped to pick up her gun, heard Black Arrow turn in his sleep, muttering as he moved. That held her tense, for a moment, but when no further sound came from him she groped her way slowly out toward the tree-shadows. She faced a clean grove of sparsely growing spruce, an undulating grove carpeted with needles that completely cushioned her steps. Below her, on her right, she could see the occasional glimmer of the river. And the cushioned aisles between the colonnading trees seemed singularly orderly and inviting and easy to traverse. And the darkness was not so disturbing as she had anticipated. She even experienced, as she struck deeper and deeper into the balsam-scented solitude, a sense of liberation, of escape, of delivery from something more disturbing than loneliness.

Her spirits rose perceptibly, in fact, with the coming of daylight, and once she could see the red and gold of a promised sunrise she felt more sure of herself. She washed in a brawling brook that went tumbling down toward the river, and breakfasted on its bank, and went resolutely forward again. At one of the pools in a second stream she beheld a small furred animal in the act of catching a fish, and on the hilltop beyond this stream she was startled to see a deer spring from a thicket and go wavering off through the filtered sunlight. She found herself buoyed up by these discoveries, implying as they did the promise of food in emergency. But she wasn’t altogether sure as to the best way of using her trolling-spoon, just as she remained a trifle uncertain as to how far her shotgun would carry.

By the time the sun was overhead, however, she noticed a perplexing change in the character of the country. The clean slopes of spruce-land had ended and she found herself in a more diversified terrain, cut with ridges of bald rock and lateral valleys with stretches of thicket and marshland along their bottoms. Along the slopes, too, she found more underbrush, underbrush through which it was no easy thing to shoulder and fight her way. So she broke contact with the river, temporarily, and chose the more open path along one of the longer rock-ridges, persuaded that she must eventually rejoin the winding waterway behind her.

But, within a mile, her rock-ridge unexpectedly lost itself in a lake fringed with clump-willow and bunch-grass. When she decided to turn to the right and skirt the western shore of this lake she found the ground under her feet disturbingly soft and saw her path stippled with unexpected pools of bog-water. But she pushed on, picking her way from willow-clump to willow-clump, grimly intent on reaching higher ground and climbing to surer footing. Once, as she leaped for a small island of bunch-grass, she felt it going down under her very feet, going down softly and sickeningly. She saved herself only by clinging to a handful of near-by willow-branches. But her gun fell from her hand as she struggled for a footing, fell into the ooze and disappeared from sight.

She thought, at first, that it would be easy enough to recover. But her heart sank as she raked and groped and prodded through the engulfing muck. It was lost; it was gone forever. And the manner of its going was a renewed warning of the danger that surrounded her. She too could sink at any moment in that morass. She could go down, foot by foot, until the pleasant blue sky and the warm summer air, through which she could hear the song of a white-crowned bunting, were forever shut off from her.

Her heart was throbbing riotously as she leaped for another footing, found that green-scummed island going down under her heels, stumbled forward, and ran blindly along a sponge-like causeway that subsided and boiled with beryl-tinted water as it took her weight. She was panting aloud, by this time, and she felt that she could go no farther. But, as she stopped to rest, she knew that invisible hands were still reaching for her, that these perilous sedge-hummocks could never sustain her. So she went on again, from cushioned hummock to hummock, sometimes stumbling, sometimes floundering knee-deep in ooze, but never daring to stop.

She got through, at last, emitting little wails of breathlessness as she found moss-covered rocks once more under her feet. Those oddly animal-like sounds still broke from her throat when she staggered on to higher ground, where she fell forward on her face, inhaling the odor of sun-scorched club-moss. But she was satisfied to lie there, with her tired lungs pumping and the pain slowly loosening about her heart.

She sat up at last and looked perplexedly about her. She could see the darkling spruce-lands that once more confronted her, that rolled wave by blue-misted wave about her. But she had no way of knowing north from south or how far she had gone from her guiding river. All sense of direction had slipped away from her. And even to go back, now, was utterly out of the question.

She knew then that she was lost, completely and abandonedly lost in a northern wilderness. And she alone was to blame. She had lost herself, through her own blundering, through more of that blundering that had made up so much of her existence. But finally, and for once in her life, she was afraid of the outcome. She remembered, bitterly enough, how they had once called her fearless, how she had taken a wayward pride in going her own way at the call of her own impulses. But there had always been a friendly hand, in the old days, to help her back to solid footing. Somewhere, just around the corner, had always stood protection. And her courage had been an empty and pretentious pose.

She shuddered as she slowly rose to her feet and as slowly mounted the broken slope that showed no trail, that led nowhere. And as she forged listlessly forward, little moans of desperation broke from the woman who had once been known as fearless, little moans that deepened into sobs of helplessness.

Winslow, as Casey Crowell maneuvered for a landing nearer the shore-line, saw that another plane had preceded them in to Lake Wapanapi. He even resented its presence there as an intruder. He could accept it only as an interloper, and the frown on his troubled face deepened perceptibly as he turned back to study it, riding so indolently on the open water, resting so confidently where it wasn’t wanted.

Winslow thought, at first, that it was a press plane. But Casey, heeling down into the lake-water and drifting to a stop along the low swells, soon put him right on that point.

“That’s a Laurentide Air Service machine,” he explained. “They’ve a base at Remi Lake, about fifty miles west of Cochrane. But I imagine this bird’s come in from the Haileybury base on Lake Temiskaming. They’ve been carrying supplies in to the new Rouyn district. But they seem to have poked a finger in this pie. That’s their canvas boat pulled up on the beach there.”

Winslow proffered no immediate response to this information, and Casey made no further effort at explanation. Allowances, he knew, would have to be made for the Big Boss. That old fighter, Casey remembered, was staggering grim-willed across a new kind of battle-field. He wasn’t a whiner, of course, but his face, to the discreet-eyed young flier, had a worn and trampled look, rather like a strawberry-patch after the pickers had worked it over. And Winslow, even in those mellower moods when he had sometimes looked as large and benignant and delusively tender as a Zoo lion shortly after feeding-time, wasn’t a man to be trifled with in his hour of trouble.

So Casey held his peace. He sat blinking out over the lonely saw-toothed edge of the pinelands until his passenger heaved a great sigh and began to unbuckle his seat-straps.

“Let’s get ashore,” growled Winslow. That growl, the younger man knew, was merely a whistle to get past the graveyard. For they were both a little afraid of what might or might not be awaiting them just over the hill.

Yet when they were close enough to wade to land, Casey, for reasons entirely his own, preferred to remain with his flying-boat.

“There’s still a leak in that water-jacket,” he announced. “I’ll stick here and get things ready for a take-off.”

Winslow said nothing. But his eyes were stern and his jaws were set tight as he climbed the broken slope toward the island cabin. He tried to walk calmly, even though the ache of unrest in his heart kept prompting him to hurry.

At the crest of the hill he came face to face with a man in a mottled gray golf-suit. This man, he saw, was Peter Summers—Peter Summers, looking absurdly spick-and-span and pallid-faced in the revealing white sunlight.

“What’re you doing here?” demanded Winslow, trying to dissemble the shake in his knees.

“The same thing, I imagine, that you’re doing,” was Peter’s deliberately curt retort. Yet one glance told him, plainly enough, the strain the older man was under. The rugged wide face looked gray and haggard, and the heavy brows drooped, giving a wordless air of pathos to the eyes that seldom bore a look so stricken.

“You know what’s happened?” asked Winslow, resenting the accusatory air which hung about the younger man.

Peter, for reply, handed him the roughly scrawled note that Paddy had left pinned to the door. Winslow’s face hardened as he read it.

“That means they’re both out there,” he said with an all too betraying quaver in his voice. “You know that Jinny’s lost somewhere in these woods?”

Peter said, “Yes.”

Winslow, for some reason, found it hard to go on. He was staring at the deserted cabin.

“We’ve got to get busy,” he suddenly proclaimed. “Time counts in a case like this. We had a forced landing and lost a day.” His eye was opaque as he turned back to Peter. “How’d you get in here?”

“I hired that flying-boat at Haileybury,” explained Peter. “But Bodkin, my pilot, is none too sure of this country. And Jinny’s letter didn’t make things any too clear for me.”

“Ah, you had a letter from Jinny?”

“That’s what brought me here,” was Peter’s curt retort. Yet he regretted it, a moment later, when he observed the quivering underlip of the older man.

“And you intended to take her out?” asked Winslow.

“I still intend to take her out,” proclaimed Peter, with an altogether new and steely note in his voice.

Winslow preferred not to meet his eye. He stared at the clothes-line of braided rawhide from which swung a narrow-shouldered jacket of sack-hemp.

“I thought I—I was doing the right thing,” he said, trying his best to steady his voice. “But it’s—it’s turned out wrong. It’s really an awful mix-up, Summers.”

“Meeting emergencies is a part of my profession,” Peter announced with unlooked-for quietness.

That seemed to steady the unhappy Winslow a little. But his brow remained clouded.

“How in God’s name,” he demanded in a none too steady voice, “is a man going to save them?”

“By finding them!”

But Peter’s professional crispness was lost on the other.

“It’s not that. What I mean is save them from themselves, from this world that seems to have gone mad since we were young.”

“It’s no madder than it used to be.”

“But your own flesh and blood—you’ve got to get them set straight, set straight with honor and clean-living and all that.”

“I can’t see any short-cut to it,” was Peter’s slightly retarded reply. “You can’t say ‘Be pure in heart, girls, or I’ll whale the hide off you!’ ” But even the acidulated smile faded from Peter’s lips before he went on again. “About the best we can do, I think, is to keep them as close as we can in our loving kindness—and trust to luck.”

He moved uneasily, with the abashment of a reticent man emerging from a surrender to feeling.

“I want to save ’em,” muttered the man with the tired eyes.

“Then let’s get busy at it,” proclaimed Peter.

But Winslow still hesitated. He compelled his heavy gaze to meet that of the younger man.

“You don’t altogether understand this,” he said, coercing himself to calmness. “My girl—Jinny—my Jinny, has gone away with an Indian named Black Arrow.”

The silence was only a momentary one.

“She won’t go far,” was Peter’s quiet response.

“Do you know anything about Black Arrow?”

“No,” said Peter, “but I know Jinny.”

Again a moment’s silence hung between them.

“I hope to God you’re right!” And that cry seemed wrung from the depths of the older man’s soul. “But it’s too late for talking. What we want right now is action.”

“I’m ready,” proclaimed Peter. “It means a searching party, of course. How many men can we get?”

“Only what we’ve got right here.”

“How about blood-hounds in a case like this?”

“Blood-hounds be damned. This isn’t Alabama,” Winslow cried with unexpected spirit. “What we’ve got to do is comb this country with our flying-boats. And we’ve still got seven hours of daylight for dragging those hills.”

“My pilot’s ready when you are,” announced Peter. “He told me, by the way, that he’s been covering the trail into the Rouyn gold-fields in less than one hour, where it used to take six or seven days of hard paddling. So having these boats ought to be something in our favor.”

“We’ll need ’em,” was the older man’s grim rejoinder. But he hesitated again, with the frown deepening between his bushy brows. Defensive gestures were not easy for him. “This whole thing,” he suddenly proclaimed, “would have come out all right if those damned outsiders had only left them alone.”

“But that,” retorted the cool-eyed Peter, “is just the point. Outsiders never will leave them alone. They’re not made for being left alone.”

Winslow made no reply to that. But when Casey came over the hill, a moment later, the older man silently handed Paddy’s hurriedly scrawled message to the young flyer. Knowing what he knew, he waited for some sign of surprise, even some cry of alarm, from the lean-faced youth in the flying-cap. But Casey’s manner was singularly tranquil as he handed back the rumpled oblong of birch-bark.

“She’ll be all right,” he quietly observed.

“What makes you so sure of that?” demanded Paddy’s father, his nerves not entirely under control.

“Because she’s so essentially the right sort,” was Casey’s confident answer.

“How d’you know what sort she is?” barked Winslow.

“I know her much better than you imagine.” And Casey stood straight-shouldered and slightly defiant before the thunderous glance of his employer.

“It seems to be only the outsiders who understand my family,” proclaimed the none too happy Winslow.

“And I know one outsider,” asserted Casey as he tightened his belt, “who’s going to find her.”

“Then suppose we get busy,” was Peter’s slightly acid suggestion as his own pilot, looking remarkably like an Eskimo in his unbuttoned fur-trimmed leather jacket, came over the hill and turned the trio into a quartet.

So after a brief conference as to the best method of signaling and the best courses to follow and the best landing-places in case of emergency, they set off. Almost in unison the turned propellers sprang into life and droned with speed, the two wide-winged bulks gathered headway, the two widening hull-wakes became twin gushes of foam, and with a thunderous roar of sound the two gondolas lifted from the water, rose in the hot air, and circled gently out over the subsiding shore-line with its dentated fringe of pine-tops.

They flew in ever widening arcs, dipping and veering and studying the broken country under their cock-pits. They patrolled lonely valleys ribboned with waterways; they traversed deep green stretches of spruce-land, wave by shadowy wave; they circled over desolate inland lakes where the water-fowl scurried to cover at their approach; they banked and tacked and counter-tacked over muskegs and hog-backs and brush-lands.

Once, when they were over heavier timber, Casey spotted a gray plume of smoke going up from the side of a crooked lake of hooker-green. He raced for it, with a new light in his eyes, only to find, after an adroit landing in a narrow dog-leg of water, a solitary and unloquacious old Indian drying white-fish on a smoke-frame.

Still again they saw smoke, farther north. When they zoomed over it, however, Casey remembered it as a peat-field that had been smoldering, intermittently, for a year and more. But they encountered nothing definite to reward their search.

So when the late afternoon deepened into evening they flew wearily back to Wapanapi and taxied in under the lee of Adanak Island.

Winslow sat silent and heavy-eyed as the gondola drifted in toward the shore-shadows. And a loon laughed, derisively, out in the lake as Casey, stiff-kneed and slow in his movements, got out the mooring line.

Casey turned and shook his fist at the unseen water-fowl. Then he looked at the thick-shouldered man still seated in the cock-pit.

“I’ll have to hop down to Elk Crossing for gas before breakfast to-morrow,” he said with achieved matter-of-factness. “Then we can flip out far enough to pick ’em up.”

But Winslow was not listening to him. “It’s another day gone,” he was muttering to himself.

“When we make Big Squaw Lake to-morrow,” averred Casey, “we’ll strike something worth while. My hunch is that we’re going to hit ’em there.”

Winslow’s face twitched. But he managed a smile, though a wintry one, as he clambered heavily ashore.

“You’re all right, Casey,” he said with a listless sort of warmth.

“And they’re all right,” proclaimed Casey, as he stared out over the darkening horizon of the pinelands, infinitely wide and desolate in the paling light. He even fell to whistling, thinly but determinedly, as he preceded the lagging Winslow back to the empty island camp. But that carol of unconcern, he remembered, was merely another case of getting the frightened traveler respectably past the midnight graveyard.

Black Arrow, being an Indian, was obviously a good tracker. His woodsman’s sense of direction was something more than dependable, it was instinctive. And to follow a required trail, however tenuous, was with him little more than a habit. Tracks had a trick of talking to him, with a radio all their own. A mere footprint, when the occasion arose, could become garrulous.

So it was easy enough, once he had fought out his fight and reached his final decision, to pick up the trail of the wandering white woman. But a racial sagacity prompted him, on second thoughts, to paddle a mile up-stream, cache his canoe deep in a poplar-grove, and rejoin the fugitive’s trail a good two miles from his last camping-spot. It might be a long time, he remembered, before he would come that way again. And he wanted no interference with his movements until he had cleaned his slate and rescued his lost companion.

She had humiliated him, but she had to be found. She had used him, after the manner of her kind, but he had been glad enough to be with her. She had awakened him out of his wigwam lethargy, bringing back to him a breath of the world he had known and lost. But no man can ride two worlds, any more than he can ride two horses. He would always be foolish, now, in the older rôle, just as she was foolish in trusting herself to his world, to the forest which the outsider so seldom understood. She was absurd there, as helplessly bewildered there as he would be amid the pallid crowds of Broadway. The sooner he got her out of those surroundings the better. And the sooner he delivered her back to Wapanapi, whatever the cost, the better for them both.

But he realized, as morning advanced and the sun streamed hot on those windless valleys, that he was not to catch up with her so easily as he had expected. She had struck through that wilderness with no uncertain step. She had made her flight from him a humiliatingly precipitate one. Yet the frown deepened on his stoic face as he followed her footprints down to a wide and forbidding muskeg. He could see where she had hesitated, had gone on again, had struggled and stumbled from tundra-ledge to tundra-ledge. Then all record of her vanished.

He remained thoughtful as he circled the more open spaces of the marshland. It was easy enough for him then to make a crossing, but his brow was cloudy as he studied the rising ground beyond the morass that bubbled in the hot air with its marsh-gas. It was, he knew, no safe playground for a child of the city. He even feared, at first, that she had not emerged from that clutter of sink-holes.

Then he came up with her trail, unmistakable, eloquent of terror and exhaustion, and his face clouded again as he studied it. He knew, by this time, precisely what had happened. From that moment forward she was a lost woman. She was lost in the forest. And being lost, he remembered, was primarily a state of mind, a surrender to blind fear, a relapse to panic. He could see where she had run this way and that way, where she had torn foolishly through briars and underbrush, where she had stumbled and fallen weakly over a rock-ledge, where she had staggered on and fallen again and left a small splotch of blood on the dried caribou-moss across which she had collapsed. But she had gone on once more, like a wounded doe, with no sense of direction and no lucid thought of destination.

He knew, as he followed those uncertain steps, that she could not be far ahead of him. But his brow knitted as he studied the signs she had left behind her. They made up a record of struggle that was both determined and desperate. She was, he could see, humiliatingly intent on getting away from him. It was not easy for him to understand white women. And she might be still unwilling, whatever her straits, to have him rejoin her.

But in that, he remembered, he had no choice. And it would be settled, now, before much more ground was covered, for he could see by the freshness of the tracks that he was close on her heels. He even shouted, from time to time, and stood motionless, straining his ears for some answering call. But no answer came back to him.

So he pressed on, moody and silent, unconscious of his own hunger, of the woodland heat that left his face wet with sweat. He looked up, once, sniffing at the pearl-misted air like an animal, and still again the frown deepened between his crow-black level eyebrows as he stared up at the sky that was now more brazen than blue.

“No wind!” he muttered gratefully. For that faintly modifying light, that indefinite pearl-mist in the air, meant fire somewhere in the distance. And this, he knew, was not the time and place for bush-fires. So he hastened his steps as he followed the erratic trail through bracken and thicket and jack-pine and then on through shadowy and clean-floored spruce-lands where the resinous boles stood so close that they left little room for undergrowth.

Then, just beyond a rock-shelf in the thinning timber, he found her. He found her fallen forward on her face, half-panting and half-sobbing with helplessness. She did not seem to know him, at first, and even after he had carried water to her and bathed her scratched and blood-stained face, she remained indifferent to his presence. That torpor of listlessness remained with her until he had carried her to a more comfortable resting-place, and fed her from his ration-pack, and explained to her that he was taking her back to her own people.

He let her sleep for an hour, sitting beside her and studying her face as she slumbered. She was no longer entirely lovely to look upon, but her relaxed body, for all its tattered clothing and lacerated skin and deep-shadowed face, left him with his habitual touch of awe when in her presence. He was still in some way afraid of her, as he had always been afraid of her. She was, after all, not of his race and his world. And he had a nameless fear of her complexities, just as he knew a nameless discomfort in studying the over-intricate machinery of the white man, his mysteriously-propelled automobiles and his incredible flying-machines. She was, like them, intricately and delicately beautiful. But she was beyond his comprehension. And now, even with that trampled air of exhaustion hanging over her, she was wonderful to look upon, to be near, if only for another day.

But Black Arrow was not at peace with his own soul. He stirred uneasily, at the end of an hour, and looked up at the afternoon sun that shone less opulently down through the pearl-mist slowly deepening in the sky. He noticed, for the first time, a rising breeze that stirred the spruce-tops and gave birth to a faint sighing sound in their wider branches. And his face darkened as he sniffed, animal-like, at the thin but pungent odor that gave birth to a vague disquiet in his body.

He wakened her, at that, and was relieved to find her, once she groped her way back to consciousness, both lucid and self-possessed.

“We must go on,” he reminded her.

“Is it late?” she asked, with a perplexed look at the more pallid afternoon light about her.

“No, but there’s a bush-fire to the north of us and we’ve got to get through to open water.”

“What open water?” she asked, still frowning.

“There’s Half-Moon Lake ahead of us,” he explained. “We ought to make that. We’ll be all right there, no matter what happens.”

“What could happen?” she asked.

Black Arrow’s shrug was an evasive one.

“I’ve a canoe cached at Half-Moon, an old canoe I use for my fishing. That’ll make it easier for us to go on to Wapanapi. And if we can’t get to Half-Moon we can at least get to Lac Roulette and raft over.”

“All right,” she said, quietly enough. But she was not unconscious, a moment later, of his anxious glance back over his shoulder.

“Where is that fire?” she demanded.

“It’s away back,” averred Black Arrow.

“Is there any danger?” she questioned, stopping short and fixing her gaze on the other’s barricaded face.

“Not unless this wind gets stronger,” was his answer. “But I want to be on the safe side. And once we get the canoe it will be easier for you.”

She did not seem entirely satisfied with this.

“But if fire comes,” she persisted, “what can we do?”

“Just what we’re doing—get out to open water.”

“But didn’t I hear some one say that people can back-fire in cases like that?”

“This timber,” he explained as they forged on, “is too heavy for that. It takes time, time to burn up trees of this size, time to die down and clear up. And it won’t be needed anyway.”

He spoke casually, and he tried to appear casual as he turned to lift her over a windfall. But as he glanced up at the graying sky he was disturbed to see a flock of wild birds streaming southward, a prolonging army of them, a migration of them, emitting unfamiliar calls as they went, big birds and small birds together, in a new-found armistice of unrest.

“It reminds me of an eclipse,” said the white woman as they stopped knee-deep in a brawling brook to drink of the root-tinctured water. And from the open rock-tops beyond the brook she stopped to look back.

“I can smell smoke,” she cried. “And that wind is getting stronger.” She panted on, however, instinctively responding to his hurried pace.

“How far away is that lake?” she asked, with her hand pressed against her side.

“Not far,” he equivocated. “Are you tired?”

“Not very,” was her adequately courageous response. But, in spite of herself, she was lagging a little behind him.

“I can carry you, when you want it,” he reminded her. She started to laugh at that, acidly, but the laugh died on her lips.

“Is it that bad?” she asked.

To that question Black Arrow essayed no reply. He was disheartened, at the moment, by the discovery of several animals of the wild trotting determinedly along in the same direction, running steadily southward, preoccupied with a common impulse, oblivious of one another and of even that ancestral enemy known as man. Janet leaned against a tree-trunk, grateful for her moment’s rest, when he stopped abruptly to look back and listen. He seemed reassured by what he heard or failed to hear.

“Can you keep on?” he asked as they went plunging down a gray-misted alley-way fringed with broom-top spruce.

“Sure,” she said with forced lightness. But she was glad enough, by this time, to save her breath. Yet sharp as seemed the tightening band about her straining lungs, she was startled, the next moment, to glimpse a flurry of red deer through the ghostly tree-trunks, red deer, heading south. The sun, she saw, was entirely blotted out. And a little later, through the unearthly gray twilight, she made out a she-bear and her cubs, scuffling southward, not more than fifty paces away from them. Everything, in fact, was traveling southward, with the wind. Then came two foxes, lean and sinewed and self-contained, without a side-glance at the two humans staggering along behind them. And on their heels loped a gray flutter of hares, a battalion of wide-eyed Fear intent only on the wider and redder enemy behind them. Even a stodgy beaver, waddling from side to side as it forced an unnatural speed from its short legs, succeeded in outdistancing the panting woman.

“We must go faster,” Black Arrow was calling back to her.

She made an effort to call out, “All right,” but the words failed to form themselves. She was wondering, with a dreamy sort of unconcern, just when her heart would burst. She could feel the tang of smoke in her throat, biting sharper. But she refused to give up. She went stumbling on after the forward-bent malodorous figure in front of her, veering when he veered, mopping the salt sweat from her eyes as she ran. She was thinking of water by this time, of cooling and freshening and dark-green water, of runneling and gurgling and singing water crowned with fairy arcs of mist, of drenching and thunderous breakers on a sandy beach, crested with foam and tumbling blue-green over her panting body.

And then the inevitable happened. The leaden agony of weariness crept from her legs to her body, arrowed up from her body to her brain, and she fell forward in her tracks, with a little moan of surrender. She lay very still, her breast pumping.

Black Arrow had to help her to her feet and hold her up. He could feel her body shake against his own.

“I’ll have to carry you,” he said. He spoke huskily but quietly. And his self-possession shamed her into drawing back from his grasp.

“No, no,” she gasped. “Just a moment.”

She stood, fighting to regain her breath, setting her jaw as she motioned for him to go on again. But the smoke bothered her more and more, and her vision was no longer clear. She knew well enough what was behind them, by this time, and she pictured to herself what it would be like, to die by fire, to have a living wave of it sweep over you, as a Florida breaker sweeps over a beach-idler. It wouldn’t last long, of course, but it would be hell for a moment. The mere thought of it gave her a brief second-wind of panic. But she could no longer be sure of her footing, and she feared, at any moment, that she might fall again. So she reached out, in her dilemma, to clutch for the foolish beaded belt of her guide. She found it, and pawed at it blindly. But her fingers were without the strength to close on that sustaining girdle. And once more she fell.

“I can’t do it!” she gasped, her wet face pressed close to the cooling club-moss where she lay. “Don’t wait for me. I’m not—not worth it.”

“I must carry you now,” proclaimed Black Arrow, after one quick glance back over his shoulder.

“No, no,” she panted. “Go on!”

But Black Arrow refused to go on.

“We can make Lac Roulette,” he said as he stopped to pick her up. “And that will save us.”

She shuddered against his shoulder as a new sound came to her ears. It was something more than the mere sound of wind. It was a muffled roar shot through with a fainter crackling noise, like the far-off rattle of musketry. And instead of a vague and enveloping gray pall, now, the smoke was a wide and driving current of striated murk, rolling up on them as they went. She could see, when she lifted her head, that the upper billows had taken on a faint tinge of red. That meant fire, the reflection of fire, and it sent a new tingle of terror through her tired body. She understood then why the air was thick with dragon-flies, with moths, with unknown insects, all traveling in the same direction, all in flight before that pursuing wall of destruction. She could even make out a snowy owl, dazed and silent in its flight, drifting onward through the dark tree-trunks. And it too was traveling southward.

The white woman no longer revolted against the ignominy of her position, where the moist-shirted Indian had flung her so unceremoniously across his shoulder. He was running now, with a stride a little longer than a dog-trot, bent forward from the waist, so that her arms lay along his wet back and she could twine her fingers in under his beaded belt and steady her body against the shock of his slowly accelerated steps. They were descending a long valley-slope, clean-floored as a park, with a pooled stream at its bottom. As they plunged into this stream a marten swam beside them, so intent on escape that it went oblivious of their presence. And Black Arrow did not stop to drink, as she had hoped. He did not even slacken his pace, as he went up the opposing slope. But at the crest of the slope he wavered a little and came to a stop. She slipped from his shoulders, as he did so, and was glad to lie in a tumbled heap at his feet as he leaned against a tree-trunk, panting.

“Come on!” he commanded, almost roughly, as he groped for her in the gray light. “We’ve got to make it.”

“I can go,” she gasped, fighting her way to her feet. “Go on. Don’t carry me.”

He did not argue about it, for across the valley they had just traversed they could see an ominous dull crown of flame that ripened even as they looked into a living wall of fire, a rolling and roaring and seething wall that snatched writhing tree-tops into its black and red vortexes of fury and volleyed the heavens with glowing embers.

The white woman turned away from it and ran. She ran with her hands before her, in a childlike attitude of expectation. But the goal she seemed to look for was not there. And she could not run far. Her throat burned and her strength oozed out of her legs. She knew that she would fall again, that no grimness of will could hold her up. She tried to call out to Black Arrow, to tell him to keep on, to leave her behind.

He must have heard that gurgle of despair, for he swung abruptly about and picked her up again.

“I’m not worth it,” she said in a foolish little wail. “Don’t bother about me.”

But he was fighting his way forward again, holding her, as he went, across his chest, as a woman carries a small child. He could not run so fast, thus burdened, but he was running with all his strength, with the ancestral doggedness of the hunter and tracker and coureur-de-bois, with the accumulated sullen pertinacity of the redman blood that had brought him into the world.

“There’s water ahead,” he gasped as he heard her repeated whimper of agony at the crackle and roar that seemed to be closing in around them. “We’ll make it.”

She wanted to believe him, but she knew it was too late. For already she could feel the blast of a hot and blighting wind on her face, she could see, from pine-ridge to pine-ridge on either side of them, the resinous timber give itself to that pursuing fury, throw itself into its maw and explode with fresh exultations of dancing crimson. But, before she was quite conscious of it, they had emerged from the heavy timber and were doubling along a twisted aisle floored with thin-fissured rock, an aisle that ended on an open small promontory. On the edge of this promontory she saw a heavy-bodied black-bear, standing solitary and monumental in the thick air. It looked prehistoric and dream-like, but it no longer amazed her. The last reservoir of wonder had already been drained dry. She could see the great animal lift its hog-like snout and show a moist red throat, within three feet of her, as it gave voice to a forlorn bellow of perplexity.

But Black Arrow neither heeded it nor paused for it. He threw himself over the lip of rock and went tumbling and staggering and sprawling down a long slope of loose pebbles, runneled and windrowed with sand, sometimes knee-deep in the rubble as he went. He lost control of himself as he reached the bottom, recovered himself and tumbled again. The two entangled bodies went rolling over and over until the force of their flight expended itself, leaving them lying on a cooling mattress of water-sedge and lily-pads along the shallow shore of a lake, across which, at the moment, a bull-moose was snorting and threshing its preoccupied way.

Janet could feel the water oozing up about her hot flesh. And the coolness of it, the soft wetness of it, was infinitely relieving. She even turned half over, where her cheek lay on its surface as on a cushion, and sucked some of the tepid green liquid up through her parched lips. She was willing, she felt, to lie there forever and forever, to lie there and think of nothing.

It disturbed her, accordingly, when she saw that Black Arrow was struggling to his feet.

“We can’t stay here,” he was calling out to her. “There’ll be too much heat when this heavy timber burns.”

He was reaching for her, but she seemed still reluctant to—

“Can you swim?” he asked as he glanced back over his shoulder.

“No,” she told him, pressing her fevered arms into the cooling green water between the lily-pads.

“Then quick,” he commanded, with another glance along the misted shore-line.

She pulled herself together at that, kneeling in the leafy shore-water as she looked up at him. Her mind was clearer by this time, and the grayness of his haggard bronze face made her think of a last-year’s oak-leaf, a weathered oak-leaf streaked with soot.

“Aren’t we safe?” she asked, her voice coming husky from her smoke-scorched throat.

“I must get the canoe,” he told her. “You will need it, to keep wide of the smoke-clouds. And to go on again, when the fire passes.”

“Can’t we wait, until then?” she gasped, shaken by a terror of being left alone.

“But the canoe would burn,” he called back as he staggered heavily along the bank-slope.

She saw, as her eye followed him, the wall of fire that was already sweeping along the rock-ridge above them, sending gray-blue billows of smoke toward them as it raged. The sight of it sent a renewing wave of terror through her body. She even started after him, stumbling knee-deep through the root-tangled shore-water. But she was dazed by heat and smoke and was not in complete control of her movements. She wavered and stopped and then fell headlong across a piece of driftwood that lay in her path.

She saw, as she instinctively struggled to keep her head above water, that it was a forked tree-trunk, half afloat, and that she had fallen half-way in between its two sun-bleached branches. She let herself sink weakly forward, writhing into the narrowing angle between those two sustaining arms. The impact set the timber afloat and her numbed brain was prompted by the heat so close behind her to fight her way out to open water.

So she pushed her divided log free of the shore-weeds and when her feet could no longer touch bottom she paddled weakly with her hands, first on one side and then on the other. Through the billowing gray cloud that enveloped her came burning brands that fell hissing into the water. But these failed to trouble her. What troubled her most was the thought of Black Arrow. And next to that was the smoke, the ever-darkening smoke that stung her throat and made it hard for her to breathe. This smoke made it equally hard for her to see, and she fell to wondering how she would ever find her companion again, how she would ever meet Black Arrow in his canoe, when he came.

Then, as she floated on, splashing the cooling water over her head and shoulders and cupping her quavering hands before her face in a foolish effort to shut out the acrid pall that stung so sharply, stung right down to her very lungs, she fell to wondering why it was taking Black Arrow so long. Some one, she remembered, had called him a lazy dog, a side-show Indian who had gone back to the blanket. Yet he had been anything but lazy that day. He had been a Trojan. He had come dangerously close to being a hero. And never once had he blamed her for everything she had done. He had been big, in that. He had been almost noble; yes, a noble redman, like the kind that she and other pop-eyed children had once read about, like the kind that Casey said no longer existed. He was a queer mixture, was Black Arrow, and she didn’t want anything to happen to him. Not now. He’d been bigger, all along, than she had. He’d thought less about himself and hurt others less and he deserved to live and dance with the Duchess of Sutherland again. And, being a little unsteady in the head, she croaked aloud, with a grimace of hysteria:

She wondered where she had heard that. But she couldn’t remember. And she didn’t much care. She wished she could call up Peter, dependable Peter, and tell him she wanted a high-ball, and if she couldn’t get that, at least a tonic for her morals. She wished there was a bell she could reach, so that she could order a couple of pillows. And something to put on her hands, which were sore and scratched and swollen. They weren’t very pretty hands any more. She could see them a little plainer now. And that surely meant the smoke must be getting thinner. It meant that Black Arrow would have a better chance of seeing her, in her crazy old tree-crook, when he came paddling his light canoe across that Lazarushian lake where all the poor little fishes were turning their tummies up to the sky. And she’d be doing the same, if Black Arrow didn’t come soon. Or if it was her father who came, he’d certainly not be able to complain about her hands. He’d be satisfied with ’em, at last. But he wouldn’t be satisfied with her. No, he couldn’t be. She hadn’t played quite fair. She could see that, now that it was all pretty well over.

“It’s a dirty deal I’ve been giving Dad,” she croaked indifferently as her drifting tree-trunk grated against a gravel-bar below the blackened and still smoldering shore-line. But she was too indifferent to notice it. “A dirty deal,” she repeated dreamily, as her head drooped wearily against the sun-bleached log-crutch, “for poor old Dad!”

Casey, as he flew back with a tank full of gasoline and his cock-pit crowded with five-gallon cans of extra fuel for Doctor Summers and his pilot, decided on a little detour of his own. It was still early and the air was crystal clear. He could easily scout over as far as Lac Lumier and be back in time for breakfast.

Yet his spirits were none too light as he scanned the unrolling panorama of the pinelands. It was, he remembered, no place for a tenderfoot, and no place for a woman. Every day and every hour that passed would make the situation more serious. And if there was any finding to be done he wanted to figure in it.

His pulse quickened a little, accordingly, when against the ruffled dark green of the forest-floor, far ahead of him, he thought he saw the faint gray drift of smoke from a camp-fire. As he dropped down and swung over it, however, he discovered that it was nothing more than the floating spray above a mad little waterfall, a crazy little waterfall that he quietly cursed as he turned tail and smothered it in his exhaust smoke. Yet as he mounted again, swinging sullenly eastward, he made out a second drift of gray against the furred green of the landscape, several miles to the north. It came from beside a small and silvery-watered lake at the end of a twisted thread of river, a lake that made him think of a silver-herring on the end of a slack line. But as he swooped down on that quietly rising column of gray he saw that it was indeed smoke, the smoke of a camp-fire. He could see a diminished figure moving about this fire, an overturned canoe on the near-by beach, a second figure standing almost knee-deep in the lake-water.

That second figure looked like a woman, a woman with white arms and shoulders, and as far as he could make out she seemed to be washing in the unruffled lake-shallows. She was bare-footed, he saw as she suddenly stood upright and turned and ran ashore. But a moment later she was running back toward the lake brink, waving a pale gray garment of some kind over her head.

Casey’s heart skipped a beat as he heeled down into the lake-water, turning its quicksilver quietness into a decrescendo tumult of sound.

“That’s Paddy,” he said aloud as he drifted all too slowly shoreward. “That’s Paddy,” he repeated as he poled his weathered gondola-end into the ribbed sand.

She was wading out to meet him, but he motioned her back. Her face, he noticed, looked pinched, and there were shadows under her eyes.

“Jinny?” was the one word she uttered as he stood beside her on the sandy bank. But all her soul was in her face as she uttered that word.

“Not yet,” he answered, with a shake of the head. His quick glance made out old Pierre, calmly frying black bass in bacon-fat over a fire of birch-wood. “Are you all right?”

“Yes, but isn’t there any word of Jinny?”

“We’ll get her to-day,” Casey assured the girl who had lost so much of her old-time audacity. She seemed very young and small and helpless against that background of rolling forest and tangled waterways.

“We?” she repeated, frowning.

“Your father’s on Wapanapi,” he explained, “and a man named Summers with another plane. We can cover a lot of territory with our two boats. We’re sure to dig ’em out before nightfall.”

But Paddy refused to swallow that over-sugared pill.

“She’s such a poor little tenderfoot,” murmured the girl with the suspiciously moist lashes.

“That sister of yours,” ventured Casey in his man’s maladroit effort to console her, “impressed me as rather a sagacious young woman.”

“Kindly speak of her respectfully!”

That flash was as unexpected as a bolt from a summer cloud.

“It’s not insulting,” he contended, “to say that a woman has intelligence.”

“She’s just a tenderfoot,” countered Paddy, “in these Polar regions of yours.”

“And she’s probably just finding it out,” amended Casey.

It surprised Paddy a little, to find him refusing to back down before the threat of her enmity. But she respected him for it, she finally decided. The morose light in her eyes even softened, like meadow-land from which a cloud-shadow passes, as she stood watching him where he strode over to Pierre and fell to plying the impassive old Indian with questions. She watched him as he took up her blanket where it still lay on its mattress of pine-boughs and proceeded to fold it together, slowly and solemnly.

He was disappointingly matter-of-fact about it all, Paddy concluded. He hadn’t so much as said he was glad to see her. He hadn’t said much of anything, she remembered, but there had been a light in his hard young eye that was balm to her troubled young soul. It was a light that women are seldom mistaken about.

So she was smiling, a little forlornly, as she made her way over to where he stood. His face was thoughtful as he took one of the pieces of hot fish in his hand and ate it.

“You’re coming with me,” he said, wiping his mouth.

“But I want to find Jinny,” she objected. “And I’m going to!”

“That’s my job,” he said as he broke off a piece of bannock.

“I’m with Pierre,” she reminded him.

“Then Pierre had better come too,” was Casey’s prompt enough decision.

“No go,” proclaimed Pierre, frowning at the flying-boat. “Me paddle.”

Casey gave this a moment’s thought.

“All right,” he said. “But you’re coming back to Wapanapi?”

Pierre’s old eyes were veiled.

“By-um-by,” he solemnly proclaimed.

“Why not now?” asked Casey.

“Me find um,” was Pierre’s reply.

“Find who?” queried Paddy.

“Black Arrow,” was the answer.

“And then what?” prompted the girl.

But Pierre essayed no reply to that question. He busied himself, instead, in smothering what was left of the burned-out camp-fire.

“He said once that he’d kill him,” the troubled Paddy explained to Casey as she moved with the leather-jacketed figure step by step toward the lake-shore. “Do you think he’d do that?”

Casey’s short bark of a laugh was both a trifle curt and a trifle indifferent.

“He won’t, for the simple reason that he’ll never get near Black Arrow. He hasn’t a chance in the world, mudcatting around these backwaters in a birch-bark. That’s our work, patrolling. And we can cover two hundred miles where he couldn’t cover ten.”

Paddy stood staring out over the rolling tiers of timberland.

“I’d do anything,” she said with her hands locked together, “if we’d only find her.”

Casey looked down at her.

“I may hold you to that,” he said, with a little of the hardness gone from his face. She turned to him, at that, and studied him with an unwavering look. There was neither alarm nor agitation in her eyes. Her gaze, in fact, seemed more estimative than rapturous.

“Casey,” she said, still with that lake-water look about her eyes, “are you really wonderful or is it because you’re the only pebble on my beach?”

“I’m not a pebble.”

“No, but you’re the only man in reach.”

“Then why don’t you take advantage of it?”

She managed a grimace. But it was not without a touch of tenderness.

“These last few weeks,” she irrelevantly observed, “have made me rather serious-minded.”

“It’s done worse to me.”

“In what way?”

“I can’t get you out of my empty head.”

She turned about, under the wide shadow of the flying-boat’s wing.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you’re like the Grenadiers’ band going by on a sunny morning in April!”

“Mostly brass?”

“No; all glory and music!”

She studied him once more, studied him with eyes that were thoughtful and honest and a little shadowed.

“I ought to have a come-back for that,” she averred, “but I’m such a fool about you I can’t think straight.”

“Then you don’t hate me?”

“Not by a long shot.”

That avowal, however, brought no exultation to his face. He was buttoning his oil-stained flying-jacket about his throat, but his fingers, for all his pretense at unconcern, were none too steady. It was Paddy who lifted her small and sunburned hands and quietly buttoned the top button for him.

“Will it work out?” she questioned, with her hands still clinging to his abraded coat-lapels.

“Why shouldn’t it?”

“I’m a bad lot.”

“We all are.”

She smiled at that, rather wintrily, her face still clouded by a sense of inadequacy in a scene that was in some way refusing to live up to its expectations.

“We’re not doing this much in the story-book style, are we?” she demanded as she turned toward the weathered gondola of the seaplane. “But I suppose it’s really the wrong time to be happy.”

“Oh, we’ll revert to type,” he said as he stooped and unexpectedly caught her in his arms.

“What are you doing?” she cried, a little quaver in her voice.

“I don’t want you to get wet,” he explained as he lifted her up into the cock-pit. He was silent as he placed her in the worn leather seat, behind the litter of gasoline-cans still in their shipping crates.

“You adorable old dumb-bell,” she murmured as he buckled the seat-straps about her. Her hand hovered over his bent head, for a moment, but did not touch him. It was not until he had adjusted the last strap that he lifted his face and looked into her eyes. Then, with an altogether unexpected savagery, he seized her in his arms. He held her close against his leather-covered shoulder and kissed her upturned mouth.

“You know, Casey,” she said as she got her breath back again, and stared frowningly down at his control-stick, “when you marry me you’ll most certainly have to give up flying.”

“I intend to,” announced Casey. “And there are a number of things you may have to give up.”

“I’m ready to,” Paddy asserted with an altogether unexpected note of humility in her voice.

“And you don’t hate me?” he repeated.

Her movement, as she turned to him, was one of abandonment.

“Oh, Casey,” she cried with an ecstatic small shiver, “you most positively should be cut up into stars and pasted across the midnight sky!”

Young Bodkin knew that big John Winslow wasn’t quite himself. A man couldn’t of course, be expected to act altogether normally, with his women-folks wandering around the open forest, and so worried himself that he moaned in his sleep and went out to pace the dewy hills before it was quite daylight.

But Bodkin didn’t expect to be cursed for making a bad landing which wasn’t in any way his own fault. He had opposed that early morning hop-off. He had argued against it, from the first. He had explained that his gas was low, and he had wanted his breakfast, and he was supposed to take his orders from the city doctor still asleep in his wall-bunk. But old Winslow had a hunch and insisted on acting on it. The big bully had told Bodkin to fly. And Bodkin had flown. He had flown until his engine had stuttered and stopped and he had blamed near wrecked his machine in making a forced landing on a three-cornered frog-pond of a lake where there was scarcely room for a trumpeter-swan to heel down and come to rest. And they would stay there, notwithstanding all Winslow’s bad language, until somebody stumbled across them and canvas-backed in to them with a gas supply.

“Casey’ll bring it,” maintained Winslow as he fell to pacing a stretch of yellow-white beach-sand. “We’ll give him a smoke-signal so he can spot us.”

“What good will that do?” demanded the breakfastless Bodkin, who shared none of his companion’s faith in Casey Crowell’s prowess. “Even that stump-jumper can’t land in a duck-pond like this.”

“There’s nothing yellow about Casey,” averred the older man. “He’ll land if he has to.”

“And if he does, he smashes two planes at one crack. He’ll see that, the moment he flies over us. It simply can’t be done.”

“All right,” agreed Winslow, “we’ll have him drop our gas.”

“And just how’ll you tell him that?” was the none too pleasant inquiry.

Winslow stood silent a moment, engaged in the obvious effort of holding himself in. He had, in the last month or two, learned more than one lesson in humility. But bull-headedness could still be bull-headedness.

“I’ll tell him all right. And instead of whining there like a white-livered half-breed, suppose you get busy and make a smudge-fire on the end of that sand-bank.”

So, while Bodkin slowly and sullenly built his signal-fire, Winslow fell grimly to work carrying moss-greened stones down to the sand-slope beside the lake. These he placed side by side, in rows and loops and curves three times the length of his own body. And when Bodkin climbed to the crest of a near-by slope, to make sure his smoke-signal was floating high enough, he discovered that these cryptically placed stones, lying dark against the yellow-white sand, clearly spelled out the two words:

“The old bird has brains,” conceded Bodkin as he made his way back to the water-front.

But he was tempted, a little later on, to reverse that decision. For as the morning wore away and the sun swung higher and higher overhead, Winslow’s restlessness sharpened to impatience and his impatience soured into a low-spirited irascibility that left him somewhat dangerous of approach. And when Winslow, frowning up at the pearl-misted sun, suddenly caught Bodkin by the arm and demanded to know if he smelled smoke, the younger man concluded that his fellow-exile’s nerves were pretty well shot to pieces. For, sniff as he might at that warm and balmy summer air, he could catch no odor of smoke on the rising wind.

“That’s a forest fire,” proclaimed Winslow, his haggard face losing the last of its color.

“I think you’re mistaken, sir,” said Bodkin, with a glance toward his own signal-smoke, now driving southward in a widening gray fan.

“That’s a forest fire,” repeated the older man, sniffing up-wind, his heavy head thrown back. He made Bodkin think of an old hound, a big old hound baying an unfamiliar trail. But Bodkin, the next moment, was thinking of other things. For on his ear was stealing a far-off but familiar sound, the steady drone of an engine coming closer and closer through the faintly misted sunlight.

“That’s a plane,” he proclaimed as he turned to climb to higher ground. “I can see him there, above the tree-tops.”

“Which way is he headed?”

“This way, practically.”

“It’s Casey,” said Winslow. “Thank God for Casey.”

He was running, the next moment, to throw fresh punkwood on the signal-fire.

“He sees us,” cried Bodkin, busy with his binoculars. “He’s swinging round again.”

But as the flying-boat veered and swung lower and went over the triangular little lake with a crescendo roar of sound, Winslow was waving and gesticulating up and down the sandy beach, without quite knowing he was doing so.

“It’s all right, sir; he sees us,” explained the younger man, his eye glued to his glasses as the engine-roar diminished, faltered, and once more grew stronger. “There he comes again. He seems to have a—yes, there’s a woman in that boat with him. He has a girl in there with him.”

“Are you sure?” asked Winslow, in a voice that quavered.

“Yes; quite sure,” was Bodkin’s answer. “See, she’s dropping a case over the side. That’s some of our gas. And I guess I’ll have to wade for it.”

But Winslow wasn’t listening to him. He was waving frantically back at a half-bare arm, a slender young arm, that was waving down to him over the cock-pit’s rim.

“That’s my Paddy,” said the man with the haggard face. There was a choke in his voice, but a little of the tragedy had slipped away from his reddened and restless eyes.

“Yes, that’s Paddy,” he repeated as the roaring engine once more arrowed overhead and another case fell splashing in the lake-end. “So let’s get that stuff aboard and get out of here. Let’s get out quick, for I’ve got to find my Jinny.”

But it wasn’t Winslow who found his daughter Jinny. It was Casey, with Peter in his observer’s seat, who three hours later swooped low over Half-Moon Lake and through the smoke that still drifted up from the blackened stumpage made out a gray-faced figure that waved faintly to them from the shallows at the lake-end. And the plane, with its wings darkened and streaked by wood-smoke, its gondola blistered with heat, its two passengers soiled and sooted with two frantic hours of flying over burning pinelands and smoke-smothered waterways, swung around into the wind and heeled down into the lake, where Peter Summers leaped into the waist-deep water and waded ashore.

Casey, who had his craft to look after until the last of its headway was taken up, remained in doubt as to whether Paddy’s sister fainted from that final effort of struggling to her feet or merely let herself fall into the sooty arms of the man from the city. But she was conscious again by the time the young flier got ashore and joined them, for she was clinging abandonedly to the smoke-stained Peter and crying over and over again:

“Oh, Peter, I’m not worth it! I’m not worth it!”

But Peter, who was busy getting a hypodermic ready, quietly observed:

“Just leave that to me.”

She winced as the needle penetrated the scratched and reddened flesh of her arm. And Casey did the same, vaguely disturbed by the sight of that instrument of medicine.

“Are you all right?” he asked as he stooped over her. He felt very helpless beside the efficient-handed Peter.

“My throat’s sore,” she complained in a husky whisper.

“Of course it is,” contended Peter. “And you’ve got a strained heart and God knows what else, and you’re going to bed for a week, if I have to nail you down to the mattress.”

Jinny’s smile was a wan one.

“And you’re going to stay with me?”

“Of course!”

“Think of all the perfectly good patients you’ll lose.”

“They can wait,” recklessly averred Peter. “They always do, for a good man.”

“Are you a good man?” And the shadow of some old diablerie crept into Jinny’s tired eyes as she ventured that question.

“They seem to think so, even if you don’t,” was Peter’s altogether solemn answer.

“Oh, Peter, you’re perfect,” she cried in a voice a trifle thinned by weakness. “You’re so perfect that I’m almost afraid of you.”

“A fat lot you’re afraid of me,” muttered Peter, as he gave her something to drink.

“And I’m not going to be mean to you any more,” she huskily protested, once she was able to catch her breath again. “And I’m never going to be insulting to you, never once. D’you remember, Peter, that day I was going from the dining-room to the library and you asked me if I’d need to call a taxi for the trip, and I told you to go to hell? Well, I’m never going to act like that again. And I think I’m a little tired of being a Thrill-Hound. And I guess I’m going to settle down and marry a steady man as like old Peter Summers as I can get him.”

“You bet your life you are,” asserted Peter.

“And you can face that fate with a calm eye?”

“Quite easily,” he said, as he snapped shut his medicine-case.

She smiled at that, and then grew sober again.

“But I’m still all kinds of a she-devil, Peter,” she warned him. “Don’t think I’ve been scared into any of that chocolate-seraph stuff. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool, twentieth-century, unreformed she-devil.”

“That’s what all women are,” proclaimed Peter as he unrolled the blanket which Casey had handed him, “merely perfected devils.”

“You may have an awful time getting me tamed,” she croakily warned him.

“Your bark, my dear, is much worse than your bite.”

“Northern breezes,” she contended, “can’t always carry you back to better days.”

But that seemed to remind her of something, for the smile went suddenly from her fatigue-thinned face.

“Where’s Black Arrow?” she demanded.

“That,” said Peter, “is what I wanted to ask you.”

The old shadow crept into her stricken eyes.

“But he left me, as the fire came, to find a canoe. He went back, to get a canoe to carry me where it would be safe. Hasn’t anybody seen him?”

The two men exchanged glances.

“Trust an Indian to take care of himself,” proclaimed Casey, in his clumsy enough effort to make it easier for her.

But Jinny did not approve of that.

“Have you seen him?” she demanded.

Peter admitted that he had not.

“Then he’s dead. I know he’s dead. He’d be back here if he was alive and breathing.”

Casey, conscious of Peter’s tug at his jacket-sleeve, followed the other man a step or two to one side.

“How about that Indian?” demanded the city man with the soot-streaked face.

Casey’s keen eye studied the blackened shore-line and the smoldering slopes of ruin behind it. He stood silent a moment, with his face-muscles working. Then he slowly nodded his head.

“She’s right,” he admitted. “There’s not a chance.”

“You mean he went out—in that?” exacted the older man.

“He must have, poor devil!”

But Jinny, who had heard that, called Casey over to her side and fixed an accusatory eye on him.

“He’s not a poor devil, Casey Crowell, and you know it. He died nobly. He wasn’t thinking about himself. It was me he was thinking about and trying to take care of. It was me, no matter if I wasn’t worth it. And he had a white streak in him as wide as this lake. And if I could only think straight I’d make you see it. For you knocked him when he was alive, Casey. But in one or two ways he’s a better man than you are, Gunga Din.”

“Let’s get aboard,” said Peter, a trifle bruskly. “You’ve got a father out there who’s almost crazy with worry.”

“Poor Dad,” said Jinny, as Peter took her up in his arms. “I s’pose he’s lost about an umpty million dollars’ worth of timber in this awful fire.”

“But he’s got you,” Peter reminded her.

“Will he want me?”

“Well,” said Peter, breathing a little heavily as he carefully lifted her over the cock-pit side, “if he doesn’t, I do.”

But she wasn’t listening to him. She was looking down at her hands, her sun-reddened and briar-scratched and work-hardened little hands.

“He won’t be ashamed of ’em now, will he?” she said with a catch in her voice.

“You’re talking too much,” growled Peter, as the turning propeller flashed in the pallid sunlight. “I want you to keep quiet.”

“I won’t,” asserted the blanketed woman nested so close in his arms.

“You’ve got to,” commanded Peter.

“Well, I won’t unless you kiss me,” conceded Jinny.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

[The end of White Hands, by Arthur Stringer]