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The Print of the French Heel

For its mysterious charm and romance, there are few short stories by this well-known author that appeal to the general reader as will “The Print of the French Heel.” The scene is laid in the Northern part of Canada. A young man just out from college, in making an exploration, partly for the love of adventure among the many lakes and rivers of the north, meets with a mishap that loses him his friend and his provisions. After struggling bravely towards civilization, he faints from exhaustion. His awakening in comfortable quarters in those uninhabited regions reveals a strange story of resentment and intrigue. The story will be continued during August and September.—Editor.

By Robert E. Pinkerton

When Willson opened his eyes it was to see water slapping directly in front of his face.

He felt strangely helpless.

Dimly he remembered Hardy’s “Yip!” just before the big wave had tossed the canoe into the air.

A twist in this wave had determined that Willson should live, for he had been thrown into an eddy that swirled him toward shore.

Hardy had been carried directly into the rock-filled torrent.

Willson’s first clear thought was of his companion, and he called his name. But to each cry the only answer was a faint echoing “Jerry” from the rocky wall of the opposite bank.

Stiffly he dragged himself from the water. Numbed by the cold of the icy river, his legs were powerless.

Once clear of the water, he began moving his arms and legs to restore circulation and remove the stiffness. When he could get to his feet he hobbled slowly to the shore.

Around the first bend he saw the canoe, lodged against a big rock in midstream. One end was crushed in.

That had been his only hope, the recovery of the canoe. Now the knowledge that he was more than four hundred miles from civilization, and perhaps one hundred miles from the nearest human being; that he was without food, without a firearm, without even a fish-hook, brought a picture of his own death under circumstances far more cruel than the quick snuffing out of the life of Hardy.

Weakened physically, it was only natural that he should consider his own death inevitable and not consider plans for his possible escape.

But this fit of depression soon passed, and Willson took stock of his possessions.

In one pocket were thirteen water-soaked matches. In another was a heavy knife. A third pocket held a pipe, but there was no tobacco. On his feet were the botte sauvage of the Canadian woods.

He was wearing heavy underclothing and woollen trousers and shirt. His hat and heavy stag-shirt had gone with the canoe.

Willson knew that he was on the east bank of the Severn River, and that the nearest settlement was on the Canadian Pacific two hundred and fifty miles south in a straight line, and more than four hundred miles by canoe.

He knew that somewhere east of him, perhaps one hundred miles, was a Hudson Bay Company post on Trout Lake. Northwest, and still farther, was another. Severn Lake, he estimated, was more than fifty miles north and down-stream, perhaps one hundred miles following the river.

It was for this lake that he and Hardy had been bound, expecting to work from there northwest through the network of rivers and lakes to the Nelson River.

Willson had spent three summers and two winters in the Canadian woods around the headwaters of the Albany River.

The previous summer Hardy had come from Chicago to join him, and the present trip was a long-planned journey into the practically unexplored country lying to the west of Hudson Bay.

They had snow-shoed to Osnaburg house, on Lake St. Joseph, in the winter that they might get an early start in the spring.

Before the ice went out they had hauled their canoe and outfit over the lake to the mouth of Cat Lake River, and with the first break-up had started north.

After reaching the river’s source, Cat Lake, they had made the portage into the headwaters of the Severn, and had passed more than one hundred miles down that stream when they met disaster in the rapids.

The son of parents who had been divorced when he was a child, and having lost his mother, with whom he had elected to go, Willson’s life had been lonely, and he turned, after graduation from college, to the Canadian woods.

A liking for adventure and for the vastness and solitude of the great forest had converted a midsummer fishing-trip to Nipigon into a three months’ stay and subsequent penetration of the wilderness lying beyond the outposts of civilization.

The relentlessness and savagery of the woods had appealed to the young Chicagoan, and had aroused the fighting spirit of some forgotten pioneering ancestor.

It was this fighting spirit that roused him from his despondency as he sat on the bank of the Severn that bright May noon and made him determine that he would not die of starvation until he had exhausted every possible means of reaching aid.

With a stick he drew in the mud a rough map of the country as he remembered it from prints lost with the outfit. There was no chance in the many miles behind him, he saw at a glance.

Penetration of the big stretch of forest and swamp between him and the Hudson Bay Company post on Trout Lake to the east was out of the question.

The only chance lay in making his way down the Severn River to Severn Lake, in the hope of meeting a family or a band of Indians who might be traveling to one of the posts lying either east or west.

This decision made, he arose at once and started down-stream. For two miles he watched the banks closely, hoping to find Hardy’s body.

Failing in this, and realizing that his slow progress was endangering his own chances, he struck out more quickly.

The story of the next four days would be only a repetition of many similar stories of a man struggling on and on, forcing himself continually, in a fight for survival in which all the relentlessness of the wilderness was arrayed against him, in which hope never more than flickered, in which courage that does not flinch and determination that does not waver compelled his exhausted and tortured body to renewed effort.

It was such a fight that Lawrence Willson made.

Only once did he eat, and then it was a sucker that had wandered into a shallow basin in the rocks and could not escape before the starved youth’s fingers had seized its gills.

He built a fire with one of the precious matches; but, so great was his hunger, he began eating the fish before the outside had been more than seared by the flames.

The nights were cold and demanded constant replenishing of the fire, and consequent broken rest. Twice light snows fell, and one day it rained for hours.

Seldom was the bank of the river possible for walking, and he was forced to make detours around swamps, climb high, rocky ridges, shove his way through thick growths of balsam, spruce, cedar, and alder.

The morning of the fifth day found him barely able to rise from the scanty bough-bed beside the dead coals of his camp-fire.

The sun was high before he hobbled stiffly down a rocky ridge to which he had been forced by the narrowing walls of the river bed.

Twice the day before he had fainted, and once had been delirious for more than an hour.

He knew when he started in the morning that night probably would see the end of his journey, for his condition would not permit another day of the terrible toil.

He stumbled frequently. Once he was forced to remain where he had fallen until he could gather sufficient strength to rise.

The resumed toil brought delirium, and he wandered along the ridge, muttering of his former life in college and in Chicago, of his mother, and of Hardy.

When consciousness returned he was lying on his face in the deep moss. He gained his feet, got his direction by the noise of the tumbling river, and went on.

Again delirium came, and, muttering and stumbling, he struggled feebly on.

Willson had forgotten that he was traveling farther and farther from civilization; that his course was leading him on and on into the arctic wilderness.

He seemed intent only on reaching Severn Lake, five hundred miles from the nearest settlement. He knew vaguely that he must be near the lake, might reach it that night.

The man’s condition was pitiful.

His face was grimy, unshaven, his hair tangled and matted. His clothes were shredded by the brush and soiled.

Fingers were blackened by handling camp-fire wood, and his hands were gaunt as his cheeks.

His eyes were alternately staring wide or nearly closed. His step was shuffling, stumbling, weak, and uncertain.

Lawrence’s delirium vanished as suddenly as one awakens.

He had been stumbling down the end of a ridge, over rocks and through brush.

Suddenly he felt his feet treading a smooth path, and he became conscious of an absence of the brush which had been tearing at his face and clothing. He was as dazed as one who awakens from a sound sleep and finds himself in a strange place.

He looked downward.

There, in the packed earth that had been softened by the rain, was the unmistakable print of a French heel.

Lawrence was awakened by the tap, tap, tap of a pair of French heels on a hardwood floor.

So faint was the tapping, it seemed to his worn-out mind more an impression than a sound. Instinctively he turned to put more wood on his camp-fire.

His groping hand felt cool, smooth sheets, and the edge of a bed. It was so dark he was unable to see where he was.

His first thought was that he was in his rooms in Chicago, that the last few days had been a nightmare.

So strong was this impression he dismissed the whole subject and immediately returned to slumber.

His second awakening was like the first, except that there was no tapping of the tiny heels, nor was the room dark.

He was startled to look past the lace curtains that bordered the window into the green wall of the spruce forest, to hear the tumbling of water over rocks.

A glance around the room brought further surprises. The window casings were of dressed and painted lumber, the walls of a dark-green plaster-board.

Three good lithographs, hunting and fishing scenes, were framed on the walls. His bed was a home-made affair, but neatly dressed and painted.

Above it hung an electric light. Two chairs and a table were also home-made but not as one finds such articles of furniture in the woods.

And surely he was in the forest, for there was the sound of the rapids and the solid wall of spruce. But the room was not that of a forest home, nor were electric lights possible five hundred miles from civilization.

He lay back, too worn out even to try to solve the riddle, and was just about to drop off to sleep again when a squaw entered the room.

Silently she placed a cup of broth to Lawrence’s lips, and he drank. The cup drained, she turned to the door, nor would she stop when Lawrence cried:

“Wait! Come here! Tell me where I am!”

He lay staring out of the window, and again he heard the tap, tap, tap of the heels passing his door, and then, a moment later, sounds of a piano accompanying a voice, indistinct but unmistakably a girl’s, in the air of a popular musical comedy song which had not been whistled in Chicago for two years.

He sank back upon the pillows and tried to piece together the conflicting bits of evidence. But the strain was too much, and slowly he drifted off to sleep.

Lawrence was awakened by the light from the shaded electric bulb in his eyes and by the closing of the door.

He looked around, did not see any one, and was about to return to his slumber, when the door opened, and a man in evening clothes entered.

He looked at Lawrence through a pair of gleaming glasses, and Lawrence, too astonished to speak, stared back.

The man was of medium height and well-built, although there was a slight droop to his shoulders. Mingled with the coldness of his stare was a little of the look which is seen in the eyes of a hunted animal.

The man’s hair and mustache were almost white, although he did not appear to be more than fifty years old.

In curious contrast to his gleaming, spotless linen, his white hair and his black clothes, were the weather-hued skin of his face and neck and the roughened, swollen hands of a man who spends much time out of doors in the cold.

Lawrence had time to wonder at these details before his visitor finally broke the silence.

“Perhaps you do not know,” he said, stiffly and with evident repression, “that you have reached your destination.

“Despite the distaste which you must know your presence has for me, because of your condition, I am willing to declare a truce until you are well.

“I cannot take advantage of your weakness, no matter what your intentions toward me are, and I will be fair, but not because I expect fairness from one of your name and breeding.

“I think I have made myself plain. In the mean time, while you are regaining your strength, you must feel that everything possible is being done for you, and that everything I have here is at your disposal.

“Despite my opinion of your father, I am willing to make allowance for your youth and carry the truce so far that I will ask you to dine with me on the night preceding the day you feel that you can leave. I will not see you again until then. Ask for anything you wish.”

Lawrence did not recover himself until the white-haired man had gone. Not only the man’s words, but the hatred that showed from behind the bright glasses, the difficulty with which he repressed himself, were incomprehensible.

And then, when the invitation to dinner had been extended, there was a softening of features and voice that seemed to indicate more accurately the man’s true nature, and which seemed to promise affability and geniality toward one favored by his friendship.

The man’s attack did not seriously discomfort Willson.

“He has made a mistake and thinks I am some one else,” he thought. “I never saw nor heard of him before, and surely never did anything to merit such hatred as he seems to bear toward me.

“And I never had his home as my destination, although I surely would have done so had I known such a place was up here in the wilderness.”

This led him to wondering whether he were still so far from civilization, and whether it might not be possible that he had been delirious so long he had been moved to the settlements far to the south.

His wondering was only momentary, however, for all conjecture as to his whereabouts, his host, and the place in which he was being cared for vanished before a hunger more keen than any he had felt in those five long days during which he had struggled down the Severn River.

So great was this hunger, so acute was the desire of his stomach for food, he was about to call out, when the door opened, and the squaw entered with a tray from which arose the vapors of several dishes.

“Nee-bua bock-i-tay?” asked the squaw, smiling.

“You bet I’m big hungry,” said Lawrence, smiling not only at the sight of the food, but because the squaw was an Ojibway, the language of which tribe he understood fairly well.

On the tray was boiled moose meat, boiled rice, and bread. There was a generous pot of tea.

Lawrence sat up in bed, and the squaw grinned as she watched him eat.

“Tib-isch-co my-in-gen,” she laughed as the young man ate like a hungry wolf. In less than five minutes he had finished the meat and rice and had drained the tea-pot.

He asked for more, but the squaw shook her head, picked up the tray and left.

Lawrence did not know that he had been given a cup of broth, the stew of boiled grouse, every two hours since his arrival twenty-four hours before, and that the squaw was adopting the only safe method of appeasing his hunger.

His experience had not resulted in any serious physical injury. He was starved and suffering from exposure and from pain in his bruised legs.

His sleep of almost twenty-four hours, the many cups of broth and finally a good meal of solid food accomplished wonders in reviving him.

The feeling of languor vanished, and only the stiffness in his thighs restrained him from rising.

Four hours later the squaw returned with a tray laden as was the first. He ate as ravenously, and at the end of the meal the hunger pangs had almost vanished.

The second meal had been served at noon, and at three o’clock he slowly pulled his legs from beneath the covers and hobbled to the window.

He could see little to enlighten him as to his whereabouts. The cabin was built on a high point formed by the river flowing into a lake, the distant shore of which was just visible.

The river roared and tumbled down a rocky bed, and beyond it extended an unbroken forest.

His room evidently was in a corner. From the window he could gain no idea as to the size of the cabin.

No one appeared on the level, cleared space between him and the lake, and, after fifteen minutes, he returned to bed.

The remainder of the afternoon he lay there, trying to determine from the little he had seen the nature of the forest home in which he had found himself, conjecturing as to the character of his host, his reason for living there and the inexplicable hatred he seemed to bear for his unbidden guest.

But in all that time he did not again hear the tapping of the French heels on the hardwood floor, nor the sound of the piano, nor the girlish voice.

At five o’clock another generous meal was served by the squaw. Soon afterward Lawrence fell into a sleep that lasted until late the next morning.

When he awakened he found his boots, freshly oiled; his underclothing washed and neatly folded, and a new woollen shirt and trousers lying across the foot of the bed.

A few minutes later the squaw came with his breakfast. It was the most generous meal he had been allowed.

He felt so strong when he had finished that he immediately arose and dressed.

Again he went to the window.

Coming from behind the house he saw an Indian, an evil-looking native, evidently not a full-blood.

The man saw Lawrence, glanced sharply at him, and then went on.

The door opened, and instead of the squaw, a little-shriveled-up man, clothed in a business suit, white linen, and wearing a black tie, entered.

His deferential manner and his “Good morning, sir!” at once proclaimed him a body-servant.

“Would you be shaved, sir?” he asked as Lawrence turned and stared.

The young fellow’s hand went to his face, where the growth of ten days was stiff and bristling.

“I guess I do need it,” he said; and then, to himself: “A valet up here in the Hudson Bay country! I wish the old fellow did not hate me so. Then I could find out something about the why and wherefore of all this.”

If Lawrence thought that he might learn something from the valet, he was mistaken.

The man deftly shaved him and trimmed his hair, which had not been under a barber’s care for months, and departed, the only information he imparted being:

“You may go to the library across the hall, if you wish, sir.”

Lawrence immediately did so.

Opening the door, he found himself in a wide, long hall, the walls, like those of his rooms, of plaster-board, and the floor of hardwood.

He opened the door opposite his own and entered a long room. The sides were filled with books to the height of four feet.

At one end was a huge fireplace built of native stone, while at the other was a broad window looking out, as had his own window, upon the cleared point between the lake and the river.

The walls, above the bookcase, were covered with mounted game-heads, pictures, both photographs and oil-paintings, and pieces of Indian beadwork.

In the centre of the room was a long table on which were scattered magazines, none less than a year old.

On the floor were two bear skins. Lawrence had never seen anything like it in the woods; and he turned to look at the tumbling river, the spruce forest, to reassure himself that he was not in a city.

“You are to go for a stroll on the point, if you wish, but not behind the front of the house, sir,” said the valet as the door opened behind Lawrence. “Luncheon will be served to you here, sir,” and the man bowed himself out.

Lawrence immediately availed himself of the opportunity to look at the exterior of this building, which, though in the centre of a vast wilderness, contained the comforts of a city home.

He went into the hall, and out a door at the front to a broad, screened verandah, on which were several easy chairs and a small table.

In one of the chairs lay a delicate bit of fancy work.

No one was in sight; and Lawrence walked over to the chair, looked down at the dainty bit of fabric, and thought of the heel-print he had seen on the path in the forest, and of the tapping of the little heels in the hall.

A vague feeling that the owner of the heels had had something to do with his rescue, and the mystery which surrounded the establishment, prompted a desire to see the girl, for girl he knew she must be.

He walked out through the screen-door and across the cleared point toward the lake. Half-way across, he turned to look at the house.

It was built of logs, one-storied, and different than any log structure he had ever seen.

The low, flat roof was of split cedar shingles; the walls of big spruce, peeled and squared on all sides except the outer.

Wings on either side of the main building prevented a view of the rear.

There was nothing in the surroundings to give a clue as to where in the wilderness the house was situated. On one side was the forest, untouched, primitive.

On the other side was the lake, a typical far northern body of water, lying placidly in the sunshine. From behind the house a long point ran out, cutting off a view of the shore to the rear.

Willson sat down on a log near the edge of the steep bank and looked out over the water, trying once more to evolve a theory which would fit the strange circumstances.

A step behind him was followed by the valet’s voice pronouncing his name. It was the first time it had been used, and he turned, startled.

“Mr. Burt would like to know, sir, if you feel fit to travel in three days,” said the man.

Lawrence hesitated, looking from the valet to the house.

He remembered the hatred that had blazed out from behind the bright glasses, and that he was accepting the hospitality of a man who had plainly said that his presence was distasteful.

“Tell Mr. Burt, if that is the name of the gentleman who owns this place, that I will be ready to leave to-morrow morning,” said Lawrence.

Looking again out over the lake, he saw a canoe shoot out from behind the point.

In the bow of the long, low, birch craft, which was headed out diagonally across the lake to the west shore, knelt a girl, swinging a paddle as skilfully as the Indian in the stern.

Her light-brown hair was caught up loosely beneath a gray felt hat. She wore a gray woollen shirt, and, from his position on the high bank, Lawrence could see a pair of tiny moccasined feet thrust back from beneath a short skirt, and resting, soles upward on the floor of the canoe.

Between her and the Indian were two pack-sacks.

For several minutes the girl paddled swiftly and steadily, the water swirling from her paddle, the canoe leaping ahead at every stroke.

She stopped suddenly, and, looking back, saw the man on the point. Her gaze lingered for a moment, and she returned to her paddling.

A moment later she looked back over her shoulder, and, as she recovered for the next stroke, Lawrence thought that she gave a slight flicker to the paddle.

She did not look again, and the young man watched the canoe until it became a speck on the surface of the water, and then until the speck gradually merged into the distant shore-line.

The remainder of the long day Willson spent between the point and the library.

He was impressed by the careful selection of books upon the shelves; for an examination showed nothing lacking, nothing superfluous.

One familiar volume caught his eye. It was the alumni register of his university. Quickly turning to the B’s, he sought the name Burt.

There were several. The first two were the names of old men, one of whom was dead. The third was of a young man only six years out of college. The fourth read:

“Burt, Franklin E.; ’82, banker, Chicago. M. ’85, Harriet Bascom (d. ’92); one daughter, Uarda (b. ’90).

“(Ed. Note.—Mr. Burt went to Europe in 1905, taking his daughter with him. Last seen in London in July. World-wide search by business associates and relatives fruitless. Believed both he and daughter murdered. Had closed all business operations before leaving Chicago. Said he intended to spend several years abroad. Reputed worth several millions.)”

“That tells the story, all right,” thought Lawrence; “although it fails to explain why he should be living here. I remember the fuss that was kicked up when he disappeared.

“Every one thought he had skipped with the bank’s funds until it was discovered that everything was shipshape when he left.

“And it seems to be my father that he hates. Perhaps he has good cause. It’s a mystery how he learned my name. There was nothing in my clothes to tell who I was.

“I suppose I might straighten things out by telling him that I haven’t seen my father for fifteen years. Wonder if he’s at the bottom of Burt’s exile?”

Lawrence looked out over the lake to the opposite shore where the canoe had disappeared.

“I guess I’ll explain about my father and myself,” he mused.

And then came the vague thought that, subconsciously, he had always been true to the father his mother had painted, despite his own child-formed picture of a selfish, flint-hearted parent and husband.

“I guess I’ll leave to-morrow, and let him think what he pleases about me,” he thought, gazing regretfully out over the lake.

“But I would like to see my lady of the French heels again,” he said aloud.

Lawrence was in his room at six o’clock that night. Except for his glimpse of the girl in the canoe, the evil-looking half-breed before the house, and the valet, he had not seen any one all day.

The door opened and the valet entered, carrying a suit of evening clothes and the necessary linen.

“I have prepared your bath, sir,” he said. “I am sorry, but you will have to go down the hall to the bath-room, sir. It is the only one we have.”

Lawrence was given a bath-robe and directed to the tub. It was a large one. Seams showed that it had not been pressed from one piece, like ordinary bath-tubs, and the enamel was not so smooth and even.

“Brought in in sections,” thought Lawrence as he turned the faucets and found hot water in plenty. After he had returned to his room he was shaved and dressed with the valet’s aid.

“These are generally used here, sir,” said the valet, placing a pair of beaded moccasins on Willson’s feet. “We could not fit you with patent boots.”

“Do you keep evening clothes for all your guests?” asked the young man.

“We just happened to have this suit, sir,” was all the valet would say.

Lawrence was left to himself for ten minutes. Then the valet announced dinner.

“They double up and make a butler of him,” thought Lawrence as he followed the servant down the hall.

If Lawrence had been surprised by the house, by the library, by the electric lights, the bath-room, the warm water, the dining-room proved even more marvelous.

First he was shown into a large living-room, in which were a piano, more game-heads, more rugs, more pictures and books and a room-wide window that looked out over the lake. Lawrence, open-eyedly astonished, walked to the middle of the room.

He was recalled to his senses by hearing his name called. Turning, he saw Mr. Burt.

His host did not offer to shake hands, but the hatred was gone from his eyes, and his spoken greeting was cordiality itself.

“Dinner is served, I believe,” said Mr. Burt, and he led the way to the dining-room, passing through a wide connecting door.

The room was much like the living-room, a broad window looking out over the lake, pictures and game-heads on the walls of plaster-board, the ceiling large beamed, the floor of hardwood and covered with the skins of animals.

But the table! None in a city could have been set more correctly or invitingly.

It glittered with cut glass and silver. There were early spring flowers in vases on table and sideboard, and there was a cocktail at each of the two places set.

In striking contrast to the richness of the setting, to the attire of the two men, was the meal itself.

Following the cocktail came bean soup, then a baked lake-trout garnished with a sprig of parsley.

Then roast moose, rich brown gravy and boiled wild rice. At the end came stewed raisins, and then coffee was served, and cigarettes.

Mr. Burt presided over the table with the ease and geniality that would have marked a similar dinner in his former home in Chicago. Only once did he apologize.

“I am sorry that I cannot offer you some wine,” he said, “but the canoe in which two cases were coming up last summer was wrecked, and we have been without it for a year.”

Not once, in word or feature, in his eyes or in the tone of his voice, did Mr. Burt betray the feeling he had so frankly stated he held for his guest.

In compliance with his determination, Lawrence did not tell how it happened that he was in the country.

Their talk was from the first of their alma mater, for early in the dinner Lawrence had spoken of the fact that they were from the same college.

Mr. Burt’s affability and geniality increased when he learned this, and he talked of his college days for an hour or more.

When the cigarettes were lighted there was a pause in the conversation. Finally Lawrence burst forth impetuously:

“I may be treading on forbidden ground, Mr. Burt, but I cannot down my curiosity. I can account for the books, the bath-tub, the electric lights, the pictures, all this,” and he indicated the table, “but the hardwood floors are a mystery that I cannot fathom.”

Mr. Burt laughed.

“They were a mystery to me, too, until I discovered the answer. When I built this cabin there was a grove of oak-trees on a point a mile down the lake.

“I could not imagine how they got there, but I took them anyhow. Only last year I learned that late in the seventeenth century there was a Hudson Bay Company post on that point, and that the factor, an Englishman, because of a love for the tree of his native land, had sent for a gallon of acorns and planted them.

“They did not fare very well, but the grove was two hundred years old when I came, and I managed to get enough timber for the floors. What is your explanation of the rest?”

“I did not see how you could have hauled in the lumber,” replied Lawrence, “but I did see how it was possible to transport the rest by canoe. But it must have been a stupendous undertaking.”

“Yes, and it required three years to get all this in and into shape,” said Mr. Burt. “The piano, bath-tub, dynamo, waterwheel machinery, furnace, cooking-range and several other things were, of course, made to order so that they could be taken apart and transported in pieces weighing no more than one hundred pounds.

“Everything was assembled in England and shipped to Fort Severn, on Hudson Bay, at the mouth of Severn River. From Fort Severn to this place is almost three hundred miles by canoe, with many portage. In all there are one hundred and sixty-four canoe-loads in the house and its furnishings. Indians spent three summers getting it in.”

The conversation turned to the far north country, and a new bond was formed by the love of both for the wilderness, for the north, for the canoe and the rifle.

Mr. Burt told how he got the big moose head in the library down north of Cat Lake, and the record caribou antlers northwest toward the Nelson River.

For the first time the girl in the canoe was mentioned when he said that his daughter was responsible for the big bear rug in the living-room, having killed the animal when canoeing alone up the river.

So interested was his host, and so great was Lawrence’s interest in the things of the forest, it was after midnight before he took his leave and went to his own room across the hall.

At six o’clock the next morning he was called by the valet.

“Your canoe is ready, and your outfit packed, sir,” he said. “Your breakfast will be brought to you here. Afterward Mr. Burt will see you for a moment in the library.”

Lawrence quickly dressed, and ate the breakfast the valet brought him.

He found Mr. Burt standing by the window in the library. He was dressed in woolen clothing, the botte sauvage on his feet, his clothing more in keeping with the tan of his face and neck than had been the evening clothes of the night before.

As Lawrence saw him standing there, looking out over the lake, his first impulse was to explain his relations with his father, convince his host that he had not come on the errand he believed.

As he was about to begin, Mr. Burt turned.

His courtesy and good nature had disappeared with his evening clothes, and only hatred was in the eyes behind the glasses.

“Young man,” he said, “you are the third sent by your father to this house. As you undoubtedly know, the others never returned. They left here safely, fully equipped, but, I have learned, never reached the outside.

“In view of their failure, I wonder that even your father should send you on so dangerous an errand. The others delivered written messages. Yours, undoubtedly, was to be verbal. There is no need for you to give it. I know it.

“I might add that I have to thank you for a pleasant evening. I was glad of this first opportunity in years to talk with one of my own kind, one from my own college. My offer of a truce may appear to be inconsistent with my true feeling, but I think you can understand.”

Lawrence, moved by a note of loneliness which was the first indication of weakness on the part of his host, felt an irresistible desire to tell his true story.

He liked this gray-haired exile, and the memory of a tumbled mass of brown hair beneath a gray felt hat, a lithe, strong, young figure swaying in the rhythmic stroke of the expert paddler, all but forced him to speak. But Mr. Burt went on:

“You are to leave this morning. You will have supplies sufficient to reach the Canadian Pacific. This is the second day of June, and you should reach there the last of the month, with good luck.

“Were it not that I know your father so well, and were it not that I believe no good can come from such stock, I would be tempted to be less harsh with you, for, frankly, you surprised me last night.

“I would believe that the fact that my daughter saved your life would lead you to report that you return empty-handed. As it is, I expect nothing and ask nothing of you. Your canoe is ready.”

Mr. Burt opened the door, and, dazed, Lawrence went out.

The vehemence of his host’s denunciation had not affected him, but the knowledge that he owed his life to his lady of the French heels momentarily robbed him of speech, and he stood motionless in the hall.

Burt, about to close the door, and mistaking the reason for Willson’s remaining, said:

“Perhaps you have heard how the Hudson Bay Company sent those who had incurred its disfavor out on the long traverse?

“You know that, under the circumstances, I would be justified in doing the same with you. You will notice that I am sending you away—but fully equipped.”

He abruptly shut the door, and Lawrence went down the hall and out onto the verandah.

There the valet waited for him, and led the way down to the beach, where a birch canoe, with a well-filled pack-sack in the bow, and a rifle leaning against a thwart, rested half out of the water.

“The mouth of the river by which you came is five miles down the west shore,” he said and turned up the bank.

Lawrence did not realize at the time that the man had omitted the “sir.”

He was occupied with the thought that the direction he was to travel was the same as that taken the preceding morning by the girl in the canoe.

An hour and a half later Lawrence reach the mouth of the river.

He found a waterfall there and a portage on the east side. He went across first with the pack-sack.

Half-way over, when at the top of the end of a ridge, he found that the trail was hard packed.

The place seemed vaguely familiar, and he set down the pack. Before him, in the now hardened clay, was the print of the French heel that had been the last thing he remembered before waking in Mr. Burt’s house!

“This is where she found me,” he thought, looking at the little hole in the ground, now slightly distorted by the drying earth. “I wonder how she got me over to the cabin.”

All that day and the next Lawrence poled and paddled and portaged up the river.

The third day was the same, and late in the afternoon of the fourth day, when his canoe was given a sudden twist by the current as he was poling up through a stretch of rapids, the bow was thrown heavily against a jagged rock and suffered a bad tear in the bark.

He was just above an island in the middle of the river and drifted quickly to the up-stream point. Landing, he examined the break and then went up the bank to find some spruce pitch with which to mend the hole.

Lighting a small fire to dry poplar twigs, which burned without smoke and gave a hot blaze, he melted the pitch. While applying it to the patch over the tear he glanced up to see an Indian, alone in a birch canoe, poling up the stream along the west bank.

It was the half-breed he had seen at the Burt cabin. The native saw him but gave no sign and continued on up the stream.

His canoe mended, Lawrence went on until sunset, when he stopped and made camp for the night.

After the first two days of the journey his strength had fully returned, and he traveled all of the long days.

The next morning he was up at daylight, which, in that latitude and at that time of the year, came early.

Opening the pack-sack to get the materials for his breakfast, he found that all the food was gone. At first he thought nothing else had been disturbed, until he searched for the box of cartridges and found they, too, were missing. For a moment Lawrence was dazed.

Except that he had a canoe and a blanket, his condition was little better than when his own canoe had been wrecked and Hardy lost.

His first thought was to return at once to Burt’s. Then he remembered the Indian who had passed him at the island, and, as a shock, came the last words of Franklin Burt:

“You will notice that I am sending you away—but fully equipped.”

Burt had emphasized “sending you away.”

“He was clearing his own skirts in case his actions should become known,” thought Lawrence. “He’s a pleasant sort of murderer. There is no use in returning to his place.

“He meant to kill me, to prevent my getting to the outside, but he didn’t want me smeared around his place. That Indian is probably down-stream waiting to see what I do.

“I could make Burt’s in a long day, down-stream, but that is useless. It’s at least fifty miles, with the long portage, to Cat Lake, and then, after crossing that, I will have a good run down Cat Lake River to St. Joseph Lake and Osnaburg house.

“But it will take me five long days, and maybe eight or ten, and there’s nothing to eat between here and there. That’s the only way, and there is no use delaying.”

Lawrence immediately set his canoe into the water and poled on up-stream.

He smiled grimly when he made the first portage, for only one trip, with his blanket and the canoe, was necessary. For two hours he poled steadily.

Turning a sharp bend in the river, and working over to the west bank to avoid some bad rocks, he almost ran the bow of the canoe on a pack-sack which was washing gently in the shallow water near the bank. Pulling it out, he pushed in to shore and opened his find.

In it were a tea-pail, a small frying-pan, raisins, ten pounds of flour, three pounds of bacon and baking-powder.

“I guess that fools old Burt, unless he ordered the half-breed to keep on my trail and see that I die,” he mused. “But how did this pack-sack happen to be here? It hasn’t been in the water long, and it is not one of the sacks Jerry and I lost. But I’m not asking any questions. It’ll see me through to Osnaburg house.”

Spreading the contents of the pack-sack on the bottom of the canoe to dry, Lawrence pushed out and started up-stream. He poled steadily for two hours and turned a bend into the foot of the rapids in which he and Jerry had been upset.

The river made another and sharper bend just beyond, and around this he knew he could find good going on the beach and carry around the worst of the rapids.

But fast water lay between that point and himself, and every energy was devoted to the pole.

Standing sidewise in the canoe and toiling in the worst of the current, Lawrence was so startled that he almost dropped the pole when he heard a cheery “B’jou” at his back.

Turning, he saw, not more than fifteen feet away, a girl sitting on a rock in the middle of the stream.

As Lawrence stared, hardly believing what he saw, the current caught the bow of his canoe and swept it back down the stream.

“You are not going to leave me when I have waited so long?” she said laughingly, and Lawrence snubbed the canoe, quickly turned its head again up-stream and over toward the rock on which the girl was sitting.

The water boiled and foamed below the rock, but the current was not so swift, and, in three minutes, the girl had grasped the bow and pulled the canoe alongside.

“Thank you,” she said as she stepped in and picked up a paddle. Settling to her knees, Indian fashion, her feet, thrust out behind, touched the bacon.

“You will have to take that meat away,” she said. “I can’t stand the sight of food. I haven’t had a bite since yesterday morning when we upset.”

“What!” exclaimed Lawrence. “Nothing to eat for more than a day? We’ll go ashore and fix up something. You must be nearly starved. As a matter of fact, I haven’t had anything to eat since last night.

“Some one stole all my grub and ammunition last night, and I found this pack-sack in some shallows a couple of hours ago. I thought I would go on until noon before I breakfasted. How did you get onto that rock?” he asked as they landed.

“You know yourself what the rapids above are,” she said. “I saw your canoe lodged against a rock. Ashawa, the old Indian who was with me, and I portaged and set in just above where the worst begins.

“As we pushed off he caught his paddle between two rocks and broke it square off. Before I could turn her up-stream the canoe was swept back and into the rapids, sidewise. I haven’t seen poor Ashawa since. His head must have hit a rock.

“I went through, how I don’t remember much, and landed up against that rock. I struck awfully hard, but managed to hang on and crawl up on top. I have been there ever since.

“I would have tried to swim to shore, but I was bruised when I hit the rock and did not feel able.”

“You plucky little thing!” exclaimed Lawrence as he pushed the canoe to the bank.

“Here, lie down on this blanket and get warm. You look as though you were chilled through. I’ll get the quickest meal you ever saw.”

He tucked the blanket around her and started a fire.

Cutting a couple of slices of bacon, he put them into the frying-pan and set it over the fire.

Then he filled the tea-pail at the river and hung it in the blaze.

After getting more wood, he mixed flour, baking-powder and salt, poured in the grease fried out of the bacon, added water, and turned the mixture into the frying-pan.

Thirty-five minutes after he had started the fire he set a big loaf of bread on a warm rock near the coals and sliced more of the bacon.

“You brown a bannock beautifully,” said the girl, who had been watching him, although pretending to doze when he looked at her.

“Thank you,” said Lawrence. “I hope it is as good as it looks. The tea is ready, and as soon as I have fried the bacon our feast will be ready.”

And there, in the midst of the greatest, and least inhabited wilderness in the world, four hundred miles from civilization, the young man and the young woman sat down to a meal of baking-powder bread, bacon and tea.

Raised in cities, but lovers of the woods, both of that bigness and broadness, directness and simplicity which the woods instil in those who love them, it was the most natural thing in the world that, boylike and girllike, they should sit and laugh and make merry over their meal, forgetful of the strangeness of their meeting, death just averted and even possible future perils.

“We have enough food to last until we reach your home,” said Lawrence as they finished and the necessity of deciding what should be done confronted them. “It must be more than a hundred miles.”

“I’m ready,” said the girl as she got stiffly to her feet. “But we will have to hurry to make it by to-morrow night. I have made this trip twice, and it generally takes two days from here.”

“Where do you go, and where, if I may ask, were you going when this happened?” asked Lawrence, as he set the canoe into the water and held it while the girl took her place in the bow.

“Ashawa’s brother, who has been trapping over east of Cat Lake this last season has a sick child, and Ashawa and I were going to his camp. I’m sort of a doctor for the Indians around here,” she said laughingly, “and they always send for me.”

“And you go out alone with them?”

“No, only with Ashawa. Father and I would trust him anywhere. But don’t let’s talk about it,” and she shook two big tears from her cheeks. “Ashawa, if he was an Indian, was like an old uncle to me, and I don’t know what I’ll do without him.”

She turned her face ahead, and Lawrence did not see the tears that ran down her cheeks and fell into her lap.

They swung out into the stream, each paddling strongly and swiftly.

For an hour little was said.

They passed Lawrence’s camp of the night before, the island where he had seen the Indian, through rapids and smooth water, across a lake and into the river again.

If Lawrence had not hesitated to turn again to the house of the man who had tried, for some unknown reason, to kill him, he did hesitate to broach the subject to that man’s daughter.

As he watched her shoulders and back plying the long, quick stroke of the expert, keeping to the pace despite the pain which she must feel in her bruised legs, as he thought of her courage and cheerfulness in the face of the death of her friend, and of her own peril, he had a feeling that this daughter of the forest knew nothing of Burt’s efforts to have him killed, or of the reasons for the exile of her father and herself in the desolate northland.

He did not stop to think that his return with Burt’s rescued daughter might result in the father permitting him to leave the country unmolested. He knew the only thing to do was to get the girl safely back.

In any event, that would only square himself with her, for she had saved his life less than ten days before.

They did not land until sunset. Then, at a point where the beach widened and ran back to a perpendicular bank, Lawrence turned the canoe in.

As the craft gently grounded, nose up-stream, the girl made an ineffectual effort to rise. Lawrence saw the movement and the pain in her eyes.

“Wait and I’ll help you,” he cried, stepping out into the water and hurrying to the bow. Grasping her elbows he lifted her to her feet and then to the beach.

“I’m all right now,” she said, with a wry little smile. “I’m just sore and stiff, and—look out—the canoe!” and Lawrence sprang to catch the boat as the current caught it.

“Canoes are our hoodoos,” he laughed, in an attempt to cover the agitation which had seized him upon his nearness to the girl, and which had almost resulted in their craft being swept off down-stream.

“We’ll fix it so that it can’t get away,” and he carried it to the overhanging rocks of the bank.

“You sit down while I get wood and cook supper,” Lawrence said, fixing the blanket so that the girl might rest against a rock. “You must be very tired.”

“Oh, I’ve stood lots more than this, but I never went a whole day without food, sitting on a rock in the middle of white water,” she laughed.

“I really am ashamed of myself because I don’t help make camp, but I guess I am tired.”

“Luckily it’s cold, and there will be no mosquitoes after dark,” said Lawrence as he started a fire. “I suppose you are accustomed to them, having lived here so long.”

“Did father tell you how long we had been here?” asked the girl.

“No,” he said, looking up quickly to determine just what the girl meant by the question, “but, from things he said, I imagined it must be five or six years.

“Do you like it, up here so many hundred miles from any one? I dare say there is not a white woman within four hundred miles of your house.”

“I love it here, and, with father, I never get lonesome. Then, I would love it any way, for father must live in a place like this to keep well. I would go anywhere with him if it were to benefit his health.”

“Eh! Yes, of course. You seem to be thoroughly of the woods woodsy, and there are few girls who would like it, who would become so expert as you.

“In fact, I feel that it is due to your love for the woods and the water that I am alive. I am sorry I did not see you to thank you before you left.”

“I did not save you,” quickly disclaimed the girl. “I just happened to paddle over to the mouth of the river for some pike fishing and found you on the lake portage. Ashawa was with me, fishing near the lake, and I ran to get him. He carried you to the canoe and paddled you home.”

“Nevertheless I think I owe it to you, and I’ll never be able to tell how grateful I am.”

“But what did you do for me to-day?”

“Oh, I only paid back a little of what I owe.”

“Oh, ho! And my life is of so little value that it has to be saved a number of times to compensate for the rescue of your own precious self?”

“You know that is not what I mean,” Lawrence hastened to say. “I—I—how did you and your father learn my name?”

“You told us, of course,” laughed the girl. “All the way across the lake you kept repeating your name and your father’s.

“And do you know, when I told father, he seemed angry, and his eyes were just like they were when a man came last summer, a man who remained only a few minutes and then left again. Did you ever know father?”

“Never. Did he say anything to you about me?” and Lawrence watched the girl as she replied:

“No; not a word, except that I was not to see you. Now that we are talking of it, why did father feel so, and why did he get angry when I brought you home? Did you come up here to see him?”

“No, Miss Burt. I never was more surprised in my life than when I awakened and found myself in such a place up here in the Hudson Bay country.

“Jerry Hardy, with whom I was traveling when our canoe went over in the rapids, and I, were bound for the Nelson River. We intended crossing Severn Lake, taking the north shore and striking west from there.

“The chances are we would never have seen your house. I am sure your father’s dislike for me is due to a mistake, a misunderstanding. When he understands how I came here, and why, he will feel differently.

“Now, if you will sit up we’ll have supper. Wasn’t I in luck to find this pack-sack? Otherwise we would have had to go hungry until we got to your father’s house.”

“It was most natural that you should find it, as it is one of those Ashawa and I had when we went over. Really, I am the one who should invite you to supper, you see.”

“I never thought of that,” laughed Lawrence. “Of course, pack-sacks filled with grub are not lying around in this wilderness, waiting to be picked up by hungry travelers. But we were lucky to find it at that.”

The meal was more merry than that of mid-day.

If Lawrence had been impressed by the canoeing skill of Miss Burt, her strength, endurance, and courage, he also marveled at her quickness and cleverness in the small talk in which they indulged while they ate.

Her mannishness vanished when she left the canoe. Yet, in her conversation, there was none of the emptiness and vanity of girls he had known, but a freedom of thought and a freedom from pose, both only natural, if he had stopped to think, in one reared in the forest.

Lawrence, despite his liking for the solitude of the woods, was not free from a strong desire for the companionship of women.

Often, when he was alone in his little cabin down near the border, or on long summer cruises, he had pictured to himself the sort of a woman who might sit in the bow of his canoe and enjoy the lakes and rivers as he did, who might revel in the glories of a northern sunset or the pleasures of a little cabin home in the pines.

He never had met such a girl when at college or in Chicago, and had contented himself with his dream-picture—his dream-picture and the memory of his mother.

Lawrence measured all women by his mother, the mother he remembered, and all had fallen short.

He had made the girl of his dream-picture conform to his standard, and it was because he believed that standard impossible of attainment that he was content to isolate himself in the north.

When the dishes had been washed and a roaring fire built, which lit up the girl’s face as she lay back against a rock, Lawrence, returning with an armful of wood, was struck by a vague impression of something familiar in the little camp-fire scene.

He became vaguely conscious of something which conformed with the dream-picture he had painted at many lonely camp-fires.

Miss Burt had dropped off to sleep before he returned, and he stood for a moment, looking down at the brown hair tumbling over the tanned face, at the browned, strong little hands folded in her lap, at the little moccasined feet peeping out from beneath her short skirt.

He smiled, with the tender smile one bestows on a sleeping child, and tiptoed away to cut boughs for her bed.

When this had been built to his satisfaction, and never before had he been so particular with the arrangement of the branches, he wakened the girl with a gentle shake of the shoulder.

“You will be more comfortable here,” he said, and he lifted the blanket from behind her and spread it over the boughs.

“I will build up a good fire, and there is enough wood so that, if you are cold in the night, you can build it up again. If you want anything, just call. I’ll be down-stream a little way.”

Miss Burt thanked him with a sleepy little smile, lay down on the bed, pulled the blanket over her, and immediately was asleep again.

“Poor little girl,” Lawrence thought as he looked at her before turning away. One little foot was out of the blanket, and he stooped to tuck it in.

“She’s just like my dream-girl,” he thought. “I wonder—I wonder if this is a dream.”

Lawrence did not know how tired he was until he had walked down the shore one hundred yards and began to make his own preparations for the night.

He gathered a few rotting windfalls and some driftwood, started a fire, cut a few balsam boughs, and lay down.

But sleep did not come, and, as he looked into the fire he could see the face of the sleeping girl across from him, and the little moccasined foot peeping out from under the blanket.

“The girl of my dreams and my lady of the French heels are the same,” he murmured to himself as he finally dropped off to sleep.

It was cold that night, and the dry wood of Lawrence’s fire was quickly burned.

He awakened, shivering, and was about to reach out for more wood to throw onto the coals when he heard the crackling of a twig.

He had not moved when he wakened, and he remained motionless, listening, trying to sense the presence of something near him.

Again a twig cracked, nearer. It was indistinct and heard beneath the tumbling of water of the river.

The fire had died down so that the few coals remaining gave almost no light.

The night was clear, but there was no moon, and behind him, and across the river the black wall of the forest caused a darkness which made seeing possible only when an object was in relief against the sky.

Again a twig snapped, this time near his feet, and Lawrence, without moving his head turned his eyes in the direction of the sound.

There, standing no more than six feet from him, he saw, silhouetted against the sky, the figure of a man.

Just then a dying ember sprang into life, and Lawrence recognized the Indian who had passed him the day before the theft of his grub, the Indian he had seen at Burt’s house.

Before Lawrence could move or speak the Indian, seeing by the faint light of the reviving flame that he was awake, sprang upon him. Lawrence saw the man’s arm raised, and a knife held ready for the thrust.

He rolled quickly to one side, but not before he had felt a hot, biting pain in his left arm half-way between the elbow and shoulder.

At the same moment the Indian’s body struck him!

With the realization of the seriousness of his position Lawrence forgot the pain in his arm.

He rolled quickly from under the Indian and as quickly back onto him.

His antagonist, believing his first blow would be fatal, did not recover himself until Lawrence was on top of him and had grasped his right wrist.

The Indian immediately rolled Lawrence over into the fire, and the young man as quickly rolled over and was again on top of his opponent.

There he pinned him and slowly began to bend the man’s arm back and up in the famous hammer lock. The Indian was at a disadvantage.

Lawrence, once having gained the hold, pressed the knife hand backward and up until the man’s fingers relaxed and the blade fell to the ground.

But this advantage almost resulted in Lawrence’s undoing.

The knife dropped, he relaxed, and in a second the Indian had half thrown him off and was on his knees.

The next moment he was on his feet, and, back and forth, through the coals and ashes of the fire, over Lawrence’s rough bed, they wrestled.

The boughs, kicked into the coals, blazed up.

In the dancing light the men fought for fully a minute, when Lawrence, suddenly loosening his hold, which had pinned down the Indian’s arms, grasped his opponent around the waist and threw him back over his shoulder.

Had the fight been in the open the Indian probably would have bounced to his feet unhurt. But they had worked away from the fire and close to the overhanging, rocky bank.

When Lawrence threw the man his head struck against the rocky wall, and the Indian fell limply to the ground. Lawrence staggered to the bank and leaned weakly against it.

“My dream-girl’s father certainly does hate my father,” he panted as he looked down at his unconscious foe.

Lawrence built up the fire and dragged the Indian to it.

He found that the man was only stunned, although the blood was flowing from a ragged gash in his head.

Feeling something warm trickling down his left arm, Lawrence was reminded, for the first time, of his own injury.

Rolling up his sleeve, he saw that the knife-blade, aimed at his heart, had passed through the muscles above the elbow.

It had been pulled straight out and left a clean wound, but one that promised to be troublesome. It did not bleed badly, and Lawrence decided that the artery had not been touched.

He went to the river, washed off the blood and bound his handkerchief over the wound.

As he started back to the fire he saw the Indian sit up, look quickly about him, and then jump to his feet and run.

Lawrence sprang after him, but the Indian, with his start of thirty feet, climbed the bank and disappeared in the blackness of the spruce thicket.

In the dim light of the early dawn Lawrence rekindled the fire beside the girl’s bed.

He had the tea-pail boiling and the bacon fried before she wakened.

Lawrence’s thoughts were too occupied with other things to notice that there were no blushes, no confusion, when she opened her eyes and found a man cooking breakfast within a few feet of her.

To her, after many hunting and fishing trips with her father and Ashawa, it was only the usual thing.

Brought up in the woods, with no women companions, it was only natural that she should be free from the minor conventional ideas, while her naturalness and simplicity robbed her actions of boldness and forwardness.

“My, but you get up early,” she yawned, stretching herself. “A beauty sleep is as necessary in the woods as in the city.”

“But this is our big travel day, Miss Burt, and it will be light enough to start when we have eaten.”

“Don’t call me ‘Miss Burt,’ ” she ordered. “For six years the only person who has done that has been papa’s valet.”

“All right, Uarda.”

“How did you know?”

“Perhaps I am not the only one who talks in my sleep.”

“No, not in your sleep. You look as though you had not had any. And your arm! What has happened, Mr.—”

“Larry, please.”

“No, you are hurt. What is it? Let me see.”

“Nothing, honest. We must eat and get started if we are to reach your home to-night.”

“I won’t eat until you tell me, and let me see how badly you are hurt. You are pale, and you look as though you had not slept at all. Please tell me.”

Lawrence had not counted on the girl discovering that he was wounded and was unprepared with an explanation.

Certain that she knew nothing of her father’s attempt upon his life through the Indian’s theft of the grub, he had decided not to tell her.

Uarda was quick to see his confusion and intuitively jumped at the explanation.

“You have been fighting with something or some one,” she cried, “and you’re hurt. Tell me! I know! It was the same Indian who stole your grub!”

“I guess it was,” Lawrence was startled into admitting.

“But why?”

Lawrence had recovered and lied easily; “That I can’t imagine.”

“But let me see where you are hurt,” demanded the girl, and she stepped to his side and began to roll up his sleeve.

Lawrence stood still as she removed his handkerchief, looking down at the concerned little face.

But when she had bared the wound, relief displaced concern, and she startled him by saying:

“Oh, that’s not so bad. Run down to the river and wash it off and I’ll tie it up. That is clean, and the cut runs with the muscle fibres. It will be sore, but that’s all. Run along and wash it.”

Lawrence, walking to the stream, grinned as he realized that the girl’s seeming lack of sympathy had completely knocked him from his self-created pedestal.

“I suppose such things are too common up here to cause her to act like a matinee-girl,” he thought.

When he had returned to the camp-fire Uarda was ready with two neat rolls of white cloth.

He blushed as she began winding the strips about his wound, but her face gave no indication of anything except concentration in the work at hand.

“Now tell me about it,” she said, as they sat down to breakfast.

Lawrence, as simply as he could, related the incidents of the night.

“But why does he do it? Did you ever see him before?”

“I don’t know why,” Lawrence lied, and then he blundered by saying: “I never saw him except that day he passed me on the river, and at your father’s house.”

“Did he have a broken nose?”

“Yes.”

“That is Indian Frank, a half-breed. He is a very bad Indian, and I have told father several times that I did not think he should be kept at the house. Father hired him three years ago, and he has been with us ever since. Oh, did—did you kill him?”

“No, not even hurt him badly, I guess. I threw him against a rock, and he struck his head and was knocked out. When I was at the river washing the blood off my arm, he came to and ran.

“I hid and watched for him to come back, but there was not another sign of him. He probably started down-stream immediately and will reach your house before we do.”

Uarda was silent for a moment, looking first at the fire and then at Lawrence. Her brow was creased, and her mouth straight.

Again her intuition hit the mark, and her frankness and directness disarmed Lawrence.

“You think father sent him after you, to steal your food, and then, if necessary, to kill you?”

Lawrence hesitated and then denied that he had any such thought.

“Yes you do,” said Uarda emphatically. “There is something about all this that I don’t understand. I began to suspect something two years ago, and I have felt since that there is something back of our living here in the woods that is not just right, something of which I have no idea.

“I wish, oh, I wish—I can’t believe such a thing of father, his trying to have you killed, and perhaps I am wrong in talking of it with you, for there must be some reason for father considering you his enemy.”

“Listen, Uarda,” said Lawrence. “I cannot tell much, and perhaps I should not tell you even that. I think that, when we reach your house, it would be better for you, if you wish, to ask your father for the facts. I know only this:

“You remember living in Chicago, surely. You left there, went to England, and then came here. I learned that from a university alumni directory I ran across in your library. Your father and I are from the same college. Why you came I don’t know.

“Now, my father and mother were divorced when I was ten years old. My father was stern, hard, a man who devoted himself entirely to his business. My mother was the sweetest, most gentle, most wonderful woman I ever knew.

“I went with her. She died two years later. I know why she died, and I have never seen my father since that day in the judge’s chambers. I doubt if I would know him. What he has done since I know only from what I have seen in the papers.

“My mother left me enough money to give me a fair income. I went to school, and to college. Since then I have spent most of my time in the woods, far south of here.

“Your father, knowing my name and possibly seeing a family resemblance, thinks, I don’t know why, that I have been sent here by my father. There is a feud between your father and mine, of which I am the innocent victim.”

“But why didn’t you explain that to father?”

“He would not give me an opportunity, and, then, Uarda, in spite of my opinion of my father, he is my father, and, until I knew he was in the wrong, I was not going to be disloyal.”

“And you won’t tell him when we get back?”

“No, Uarda, not unless—”

Lawrence looked from the face of the girl to the dying camp-fire, then out across the river.

A feeling, a sensation, entirely different from any he had ever known, had almost forced him to say that he would tell Burt the true relations with his father that he might remain near Uarda.

He had felt, as they talked that morning, as she had bound his wounded arm, that this girl, whom he had known less than twenty-four hours, was destined to be something more to him than a temporary companion in distress.

He did not think of this new feeling as love.

It had come too suddenly, so many things had happened, and love for any one except his mother, and her memory, was something he had never known.

But, as he looked back at the upturned face of the girl, into the questioning, unafraid eyes, as he noted the strong, little figure, the tumbled brown hair, as he remembered her courage, her cheerfulness where others would have wept, her self-reliance, he suddenly realized that he could not let her go out of his life with the ending of their journey.

At the same time he knew that, with their fathers bitter enemies, Burt probably would not even allow him to see Uarda after their return.

Then that inexplicable feeling of loyalty that he always had had for his father, a feeling that often overruled his own opinion, restrained him from going to Burt with the true story.

He thought of how, a few years before in Chicago, when he had stopped at a street corner to listen to a socialist orator, intense anger had seized him when the speaker denounced his father as a “pillager of the people,” a “capitalistic corrupter,” and a “man more menacing than many murderers.”

Until he knew that his father was in the wrong, he would make no overtures to Burt.

The fact that Burt had hidden in this inaccessible wilderness did not speak well for his cause.

On the other hand, Lawrence knew that he must consider himself, that he must not allow a happiness, which might be his, to escape without some effort on his part to gain it.

Before he could act he must learn something of the cause of Burt’s exile, of the nature of the feud of their fathers.

“No, Uarda,” he said, “I won’t tell him, and I do not think it advisable for you to do so. He won’t believe me, and, with his present opinion of me, it would only distress him to know that you believe—But there is no reason for your believing me. You have only my word.”

“That is sufficient with me,” said Uarda quickly, and then, hesitatingly, “Larry.”

It was the first time Lawrence had seen her blush, and he smiled as he watched the quick rush of color beneath the tan and saw the eyes that fell before his.

“Thank you,” he answered, and then, the words rushing impetuously forth. “Uarda, I am going to get at the bottom of this.

“I am going to Chicago at once. I am sure that there must be some mistake somewhere. And, when I do, can I come back, Uarda, come back and—tell you about it?”

“Yes,” she smiled, “come back and tell me—about it.”

“Father, I want to talk with you,” said Uarda as she entered the library and found Mr. Burt gazing out across the lake.

“It it about Ashawa, little girl?”

“No, though I did want to tell you that poor Teck-ee-mash-ee is so brokenhearted that I told her to go to her cabin for a few days, and that I would do her work.

“You know she and Ashawa lost their little boy last spring, and she is left alone in the world, except for us.”

Mr. Burt smiled. Uarda’s sympathy and thoughtfulness had won the love of all the Indians in the district.

“What is it you wish to talk about?” he asked.

“Oh, dad, I don’t know how to begin, nor how you would like it. But you know I am nearly twenty-one, and that I am old enough to know.”

Mr. Burt’s smile disappeared as she spoke.

“Has that cur been talking to you, this ingrate you have twice rescued and brought to the house in a serious condition? He will leave to-day, and without assistance from me,” and Mr. Burt strode toward the door.

“Why, dad, I never heard you speak that way before, and, besides, it is not true. If it had not been for him I would be starving to death on that rock in the rapids, and it was he who brought me here, although his arm was so badly hurt I had to do most of the paddling.

“I owe my life to Lawrence, dad, but it is something else I wish to ask you. Dad, why are we living up here, and what is this quarrel between you and his father?”

Mr. Burt stopped pacing up and down the room.

“He has been telling you something!”

“Yes, a little, a little more than I suspected. I have known for two years that there was something mysterious in our being here, ever since the Indians found the body of that fellow who came to see you and left at once.

“I have felt, dad, that it was something besides your health that brought you here, and I think I am old enough to know. Instead of his telling me anything, I asked him, and he would not, or could not, tell me little more than I had suspected.”

Mr. Burt went to the window and looked out for several minutes before he spoke.

Then he turned to a big Morris chair, upon the arm of which Uarda immediately perched herself.

“There, there, daddy,” she said when she saw the pained, hunted look in her father’s eyes.

“Just tell me that it’s all right, that there is no mystery about it all, that I am just a silly girl, and I’ll never ask you again.”

“No, Uarda, that would never do. You are old enough to know, although, my dear little girl, I would rather anything would happen than have to tell you what I am about to.

“I always had thought that the time would come when I would have to explain, but we were so happy here together, and you always seemed so cheerful, and I really had not noticed that you are a grown woman now. I always think of you as you were when we came.

“You always have been loyal, and charitable, and now, Uarda, I am going to ask you to be more loyal, more charitable, than ever before.

“Whatever unhappiness has come, or may come to you, is due to me, to something I did when you were a little girl.

“When your mother and I were married I was a cashier in the Packers Bank. My salary was not great, was not enough to meet the expenses which your mother’s social aspirations incurred. I am not blaming her.

“It was my fault in allowing her to continue, to live beyond our means. But I loved her, loved her so greatly that I could not deny her what she wished, and one day, when I was so badly pressed by bills that I could not see my way clear, I took some of the bank’s money.

“God knows I did not intend to steal it. It was theft, I know now, but I had every intention of repaying it. I guess they all do.

“Then, when I had to make good what I had taken, I could not, and I switched accounts and covered it up as best I could until the time when I would be able to repay.

“But that time did not come. Bills and expenses piled up. Your mother planned a large party, and, when I demurred because of the expense, she broke down and cried, said her social future and that of her daughter depended upon it, that she simply must or lose all the ground she had gained.

“I told her to go on with her preparations, and that night at the bank I took more money and covered it up. In the next week I endeavored to find some means of escape from my pressing obligations, for in all this time I considered what I had taken from the bank a loan, a loan to be repaid.

“Not for a moment did I consider myself a thief. I am not telling this in my defense. It is only the truth. At the end of the week I was desperate. The expense of the party doubled as preparations were made.

“One night, after banking hours, a bookkeeper in the bank came to me. He said he had overheard two big men in La Salle Street discuss a coup to be pulled off the next day.

“ ‘I think it is a chance to make a fortune,’ he told me, ‘and I am coming to you for advice. What should I do?’ I told him to go home and forget it! that a bank clerk had no business in the wheat market. He went away, but he left me with a new thought.

“That night I again went to the bank, took more money, a much larger sum, and switched the accounts. The next morning I went to a broker who did not know me, and gave him the money and his instructions.

“As I left his office I saw the bookkeeper standing before the big blackboard. I did not think he saw me.

“That night I was a rich man. The next night I was twice as rich. When your mother came to me and said the party would cost three times as much as she had planned, I laughed and told her to go ahead.

“The third day I was again on the market, and at night my fortune had doubled again. My cares fell from me so quickly the bank officials noted it, but they ascribed it to the success of your mother’s social affair; the wives of several have been present. I was supremely happy.

“The money I had taken from the bank had been replaced.

“A week after my first successful day in wheat the bookkeeper came to me again, after all except us had gone from the bank.

“ ‘I need one thousand dollars,’ he said.

“ ‘On what security?’ I asked.

“ ‘Oh, the security is O.K.’ he answered.

“Something in his tone made me look up.

“ ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘I don’t want to borrow from the bank. I want it from you.’

“ ‘The bank is the place to borrow the money,’ I told him.

“ ‘But the bank won’t take my security, and you will,’ he said.

“I had returned to my papers. Again I looked up. Something in his eyes made me uneasy.

“ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

“ ‘You know very well what I mean,’ he retorted. ‘And I know you have the money. You advised me to keep out of that wheat deal, but you didn’t follow your own advice.’

“ ‘What of it?’ I demanded.

“ ‘The bank officials wouldn’t like to have their cashier playing the market,’ he replied insolently.

“ ‘You blackmailer,’ I shouted, rising. ‘Get out of here. You are discharged.’

“He did not move. He only laughed in my face. ‘And, if they knew how you won your money, they might wish to know how you got your start,’ he said.

“I sank into the chair, dazed, but I did not comprehend all that he meant until he added, slowly, ‘And I can tell them.’

“The bookkeeper got his thousand dollars. He quit the bank and began speculating in wheat. In a week he had lost the one thousand dollars and come to me for more.

“He ran that into a fortune in a month, and lost it the next day. He came for more, this time demanding five thousand dollars. I had continued to speculate, and I was successful. The man seemed to have an uncanny way of learning my movements.

“He made three fortunes, and lost them, and each time he came to me for more money.

“The last time, in addition to demanding money, he outlined a scheme to make a fortune for both of us. I saw at a glance that it was illegal, that being caught entailed a heavy prison sentence, and I refused.

“It was only a year and a half since I had paid back the money to the bank. I was still cashier. Even after that interval my dread of being discovered had not lessened.

“I knew that, even were there no prosecution, discovery meant the death of your mother’s hopes and the end of my own reputation for integrity.

“So, when the man made this new proposition, I did not hesitate long. Not only by threatening to expose me did he force me into it, but he convinced me that, by an ingenious scheme he had devised, there was no danger.

“He pointed out that he would be equally guilty. Understand me, though, Uarda, I would have kicked the man out immediately had it not been that he would go to the bank with the evidence of my guilt.

“Right there I made my greatest mistake. I was a fool. I did not see that the man was only laying a trap to get me further in his power. I should have refused and run the chance of the bank taking no other action than to dismiss me.

“But my pride, my fear of the consequences to your mother, and my knowledge of the bank president’s oft-stated attitude on the prosecution of defaulters, forced me to an acceptance of his proposition.

“The story of that deal is long, and you would not understand. It resulted in a big scandal, extraordinary activity on the part of the Federal government in prosecution, but in my escape without even a taint of suspicion of complicity.

“For weeks and months I was in momentary fear of exposure. But, as the case progressed, and finally was terminated. I saw the wonderful cunning of the blackmailer.

“So ingenious and careful had been his plans, he and I, although really the guilty ones, were never mentioned in the case, while two of his dupes went to prison for long terms, and a third barely escaped.

“My wonder at this increased when he came to me and offered to divide the spoils, which were enormous. How he held on to them I never knew. I refused to touch the money, and he laughed.

“Then he told me how he had so arranged the affair that documentary evidence in his possession would implicate me and send me to prison, although he could not be touched.

“He showed me the evidence. ‘I’ll probably never need it,’ he said, ‘but I like this wheat gambling. If I go broke again, I’ll come to you.’

“He took his money and plunged in the wheat-pit. His operations were spectacular. Two years later he was a very wealthy man, one of the biggest in the street. For years I never heard from him directly.

“In the mean time my own success had enabled me to purchase a great deal of stock in the bank and later to become its president. My fortune secured I quit gambling on the market and confined myself to safe, legitimate investments.

“Your mother’s social success mounted with my fortune, and she was very happy. As the years went by and I did not hear from the blackmailer, I also became happy, contented.

“The man had forced himself into the best clubs, was a leading financier, even though there were some dark stories about his methods. While still a bookkeeper he had married into a good family, and, with his money, his wife became prominent socially.

“Then she obtained a divorce, making serious charges against her husband. She obtained possession of their only child, a boy.

“Then came your mother’s death. Perhaps you never knew, Uarda, that it was her success socially that had killed her.

“She was not strong enough, physically, and she would not give up until it was too late. Soon after she died the former bookkeeper bought the house next to ours.

“I never spoke to him, and he never bothered me. You grew up, and, when you were fifteen, you were the prettiest girl I had ever seen.

“Your beauty attracted the attention of many, and I was pleased, until one day, when you were playing tennis with some friends, I saw the man who lived next door looking at you from his window.

“I can’t tell you all of it, little girl, but the man’s personal reputation was bad, and, as I saw him looking at you playing there beneath his window, I had the same feeling I had the first time he came to me and demanded money.

“Many times I saw him in the window, and my uneasiness grew. Then, one day when I was sitting in the library his card was sent in.

“I was about to refuse to see him, when I saw that he had penciled beneath his name, ‘I have a new tip.’ I told the butler to send him in.

“He smiled and was most affable, despite the coldness and silence with which I received him.

“ ‘I haven’t bothered you for some time, have I?’ he said. And then, still smiling, he went on. I won’t tell you all that he said, nor how near I came to attacking him as he sat there.

“He saw me reach into the drawer of the library table, where I always kept a revolver, but he only laughed and said, ‘That’s worse than the other.’

“In short, Uarda, his proposition was this. He said that, on the day you were twenty-one, you would become his wife.

“He said he had often watched you, that he loved you—I remember how he said it, and, involuntarily, my hand again reached for the revolver—and that he had made up his mind.

“He said that in the mean time he would not bother me, would not even ask to see you, but that, unless I chose to be exposed and prosecuted, I should make all the arrangements for the wedding on your twenty-first birthday. When he had finished he went, leaving me stunned, speechless.

“At first I decided to stand the exposure. Then I thought I would go to his house and kill him and run the chance of escaping suspicion. I thought of several plans, but, in each case, I ran a risk, and you were the one to suffer.

“For months I was in despair. Although you were only fifteen, you looked much older, and he had said that he had only three years to wait.

“You remember how we took fishing and hunting trips together, how we liked our place in north Wisconsin, where we went for deer and trout. That spring we went again, and I saw how you loved the woods, canoeing, hunting and fishing.

“After we returned I heard a visitor at the club tell of a trip up into this country, of the desolate stretches of forest and lakes practically unknown to white men. That gave me the clue. You know the rest.

“I disposed of all my holdings in various companies, of my bank stock, in short, converted all I had into cash and government bonds and placed them in a safe deposit box.

“Then, with enough cash, we went to England, ostensibly to make a tour of two or three years. In the mean time I had, through a friend in England who was an official of the Hudson Bay Company, a man I had greatly aided years before, arranged for the transportation of ourselves and outfit to Hudson Bay.

“We liked Fort Severn, you remember, and you wanted to stay. The next summer we came up here and began building the house.

“Perhaps you did not notice the secrecy with which we left England, how everything we did was covered up, even the hiring of the men who came to do the work.

“Until two years ago I thought we were secure, that I had saved you from this fiend. I knew that, rather than see him gain his purpose, I would stand the exposure and prosecution, but I wanted to spare you even that.

“At first the future bothered me, but we were so happy here I had become content, and drifted. Then, two years ago, a man came from the south. He bore a written message. It was unsigned, but it read something like this:

“I have looked up the birth-records and see that I have to wait longer than I expected. But I will be ready for the wedding on the day set.”

“That was all. I knew he had found us out. The next summer he sent another messenger. He said he objected to his future wife becoming an ignorant backwoods woman, and that he thought it best that she return to Chicago.

“I was desperate, and neither messenger reached the outside. Oh, my little girl, your father would give his life, anything, if he could only shield his daughter from this man, from what he threatens to do to her.

“But I am becoming afraid. The man is a fiend. I learned of several things he did in Chicago. Physically he is big, brutal, a beast.

“He has the ferocity, the cunning, the cruelty of a wolf. I don’t know what to do.”

“There, there, daddy, buck up and we’ll get out of this. You have been the dearest, grandest father in the world, and I love you more than ever. I wish—I wish—”

“What, little girl?”

“I wish he would come up here. You know, I have never killed a wolf.”

Mr. Burt smiled as he looked at the beautiful features become stern and lit, the brown eyes blazing.

“You have become a little savage,” he smiled, and he drew her down and kissed her.

“But, dad,” exclaimed Uarda, straightening up, “you haven’t told me this man’s name. Oh, I see he is—”

“Yes, he is—the father of the young man across the hall!”

Lawrence was sitting on the screened verandah when Uarda came out from the library.

He was about to jest of their trip of the day before when he saw the expression on her face, and remained silent.

With the simpleness and directness to be found in those who live in the big woods, in the mountain fastnesses, or on great deserts, she went at once to the subject that meant so much to them.

“Father has told me,” she said. “You may go back to Chicago, but I don’t know what you can do. It is useless even to try.”

The comradeship of the day before was gone.

She spoke coldly, and Lawrence’s heart sank before the calm finality of her tone.

“But, Uarda, surely—”

“Miss Burt, please.”

“But tell me! What is it? Why is it hopeless? Why can nothing be done? There must be some way.”

“It is useless to do anything,” she said, her voice now emotionless, her eyes turned toward the lake.

“You may start when you feel that you can travel. You will not be molested this time. We do not ask anything, nor expect anything.”

“Uarda, I can’t leave like this, without knowing. You said you believed me, that my word was enough. I know no more than I told you up there on the river. At least tell me what you have learned. I must know.”

“Very well,” she said, taking a chair near the rail and without looking away from the lake. Briefly she outlined what her father had told her a half hour before.

She spoke dispassionately, evenly, as though reciting something of no interest to her. Lawrence, as the truth became known, sat rigidly, staring at the girl’s back.

As the story of the persecution of his father unfolded, he felt his flesh creep in little succeeding waves and the blood rush to his cheeks and neck.

When the final threat of the blackmailer became clear, his sensations were those of horror, quickly followed by unutterable shame, and he did not look up when the girl ceased speaking.

The old, unexplainable loyalty to the unknown, even hated, father was completely submerged in the flood of the revelations of Uarda’s story.

The girl, finding him silent, turned.

Her set features relaxed, and a sudden surge of pity rose almost to her lips as she saw the look of mingled despair, shame, and wretchedness on the man’s face.

“You see,” she finally said, “there’s nothing that can be done. He can’t harm us here, and I will remain with father forever rather than allow this man to get him within his power again.”

Lawrence did not move, did not speak, nor was there a change in his expression.

Moved by the misery which she knew to be genuine, she involuntarily stretched forth a hand and said:

“I’m sorry, Larry, sorry.”

He looked up and caught at her hand, but she withdrew it quickly and stepped back.

“But there must be something that we, that I, can do,” he exclaimed eagerly, disregarding her manner and actions. “I am going back at once, and, Uarda,” he cried, “I think I can do something—something that will release you and your father—that will make you free again. I’ll start now, at once. I know I can do it.”

“You can’t start until your arm is better, and what can you do?”

“Listen! After my mother died, my father tried to have me come to live with him. I refused. My mother, in her will, had named a guardian for me and, legally, my father could not force me.

“A year after I had refused, he wrote again, asking me to go to him. Again I refused. Each succeeding year he repeated the request.

“When I was in college he wrote me that he would do anything I asked, if only I would go to live with him.

“He said he would do anything, would abide by any stipulation I would make, if only he could have me near him.

“He would insist on nothing except that I remain where he could see me occasionally, could talk with me. Otherwise I would be free.

“I never replied to any of his letters. But each year since his first offer of unconditional acceptance of any terms I might make, he has repeated it.

“I received the last only last winter when my mail was forwarded to Osnaburg house. I am now going straight back to Chicago, and accept.”

“No, Larry, you can’t. I won’t allow it. Father and I will take care of ourselves.”

“But I owe it to you. You and your father have suffered enough as the result of my father’s sins. It is my duty, and I am going.”

“But can he be trusted to keep his word?”

“The delivery of what evidence he has into my possession will be my terms. And, if he refuses, I will get them anyhow. I am going to make this right at any cost, Uarda. And, when I have, can I come back and tell you?”

The girl started back in undisguised dismay from the impetuous, eager face of the young man.

She thought of the day and the night they had spent together on the river, and then she thought of her father, of his long years of suffering, of suspense, and of what he had done for her.

She thought of the man who had caused it all, who had driven her father from all that life meant to him; the man whose very existence was an insult to her.

She looked at the youth before her, the son of this man. And as she pictured in her mind this monster, there mingled with the picture of remembrance of the cold, dim dawn of only a day, or was it a year, before, of a young man bending over a fire, frying bacon for her, his face drawn and haggard, the blood dried on his sleeve.

Her shoulders lost their erectness, there was a sagging, a dropping of her lithe young figure.

Her face became expressionless, but there was pain in her eyes when she answered in a listless tone:

“No; don’t come back!”

She turned and went into the house immediately.

Lawrence had not seen her again when, at dawn the next morning, he paddled away, his arm throbbing with pain at each stroke.

At 8.30 o’clock the morning of July 2, a young man entered an elevator in a Chicago skyscraper.

In the car were two stenographers, four young men, evidently clerks, and several business men.

He had been the last to enter, and as he squeezed into the small remaining space there was a growl of protest from one of the clerks.

The young man did not seem to hear, nor to see that his fellow passengers were looking at him.

Tall, shoulders bulging in a ready made coat, his face dark tan that deepened until the neck disappeared into the collar of a gray woolen shirt, a stiff-brimmed felt hat set back from wavy brown hair, matted by perspiration on his forehead; eyes that seemed to be looking past or through his immediate surroundings; a jaw set and determined—he was different from any one in the car, different from the people they were accustomed to see.

At the sixteenth floor he got out hesitated a moment, and then walked down the hall toward the front of the building.

Pausing for a moment before a door he opened it and stepped in.

As he did so a gray-haired man who had come up in the same elevator, and who was still intent on his morning paper, passed to the next door, inserted a key in the lock, and entered.

An office-boy, turning from an intimate discussion with a stenographer glanced casually at the young man, smiled slightly, and returned to his conversation.

The young man strode quickly across the floor.

“I want to see Mr. Willson,” he said.

The boy, disregarding the sharpness of the tone, did not even turn as he replied:

“Wait until he comes.”

The young man sat down.

Stenographers and a couple of book keepers came, removed their hats in a cloakroom, and began their tasks.

The last to arrive was a middle-aged man who swept the office force with a glance, and then nervously walked to a desk apart from the others and near a door marked “private.”

Hardly had he seated himself and begun sifting through a pile of mail on the desk before a buzzer sounded.

He jumped to his feet and entered the “private” door. In a minute he returned, but no sooner had he reattacked the mail than the buzzer called him.

The office-boy had left the stenographer’s desk upon the entrance of the busy little man, and, unnoticed, was with his underfed, underdeveloped little body, giving an imitation of the tense attitude of the young man who sat motionless, his chin thrust forward, his eyes on the distant horizon of Lake Michigan.

When the buzzer sounded the third time the young man turned to the office-boy.

Unabashed, the boy grinned.

“No, Morgan, no,” he said, “besides, Pierp, old boy, you’re too early.”

“Drop that and tell him I want to see him now,” snapped the young man.

The boy jumped to his feet and made a mocking, low bow.

“As you please, sir, as you please. And your card, sir.”

“I haven’t one, but—”

“Of course, sir, if you—”

The young man had risen to his feet. Picking the boy up by the collar, he dropped him onto his bench, and strode through the swinging-gate to the desk of the busy little man near the “private” door.

“I wish to see Mr. Willson,” he said.

“Impossible, now, sir. He is not down yet. If you will wait—”

But the young man had turned and opened the private door.

He stepped in and closed it behind him.

He found himself in a large room—a room absolutely plain, with no pictures, only three chairs and a large table that seemed to half fill the room.

At the opposite side of the table, with his back to a wide window, sat a man—big, powerful, although his shoulders were slightly bent.

His hair was almost white. He did not glance up as the door opened, and the young man stood for a moment looking at him.

The man’s face was stern, even hard, with deep lines.

He raised his head, and his eyes seemed stern and hard, but, back of the sternness and hardness, there was the look of a man who had known a great sorrow.

He was looking at a small object on the table.

The sternness and hardness disappeared from the features and from the eyes, there came an added droop to the shoulders, and his expression was one of great loneliness.

“Are you Mr. Willson?” the intruder asked.

Instantly the former expression returned to the man’s face.

“What are you doing in here?” he roared.

“I am Lawrence,” the other replied slowly.

Mr. Willson did not move, did not speak. So great seemed the shock, his expression did not change. He only stared.

Then his eyes softened, an expression of ineffable joy flooded his face, and he started to his feet.

“My boy, my boy!” he cried, and started around the table, his hands outstretched.

Lawrence had walked to the table. As his father approached he backed away.

“Wait a minute,” he said, and the other stopped, halted by the tone rather than the words.

“Please sit down. We will talk—talk—of several things, first.”

For a moment the hardness returned to the other’s face.

Then it vanished, and, as he resumed his chair, the father said, “What is it, Larry?”

“You have agreed, in several letters, that, on condition I return, you will do anything I ask. Is that still good?”

“It always will be, Larry.”

“Then I accept. My terms are that you deliver to me, at once, all evidence you have against Franklin Burt.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t bluff. I know. A month ago I learned it all. I have seen Burt. He tried to have me killed because he thought you had sent me to persecute him.

“Despite all that I have learned about you, all that I always thought about you, I am willing to come to you on condition that you cease your persecution of that man, and give me all the evidence you have.”

“But, boy, I don’t know what you are talking about,” exclaimed the father.

“Look here,” exclaimed Lawrence angrily; “if you meant what you said, make good, and do it now. If you don’t, I tell you right here that I will get that evidence, no matter what I have to do to get it.

“I won’t stop at anything. I would rather do it peaceably, as much as I dislike the idea of coming to you, but I am desperate. You have done this man an irreparable injury, and now you plan an even greater injury to his daughter.

“I am clean and honest, no matter what you are, and I am going to see that the wrong you have done is righted so far as is possible. That is final.”

Mr. Willson’s amazement gave way to a slow anger.

“Stop that,” he commanded. “I won’t stand that, even from you, especially when you talk wildly of something of which you know nothing. You appear to be sane, or I certainly would think otherwise. Now listen!

“I don’t know what you are talking about, don’t know this Burt, never persecuted him, nor any one else. See if you can’t talk calmly, and tell me about this, so that I can understand it, and drop the personalities until you are sure of what you are saying.”

The force and energy, the domineering will, and born leadership which had made William Wright Willson so great a force in Chicago financial circles became evident in his crisp, sharp words.

His son, not expecting such an outburst, and compelled, he did not know why, to place more credence than he wished in what his father had said, lost much of his pugnacity.

But there was still fight in him when he said,

“Do you mean to tell me you don’t know Franklin Burt?”

“I never knew him personally, although I have heard a great deal of him, especially when he mysteriously disappeared several years ago. What about him?”

Lawrence hesitated a moment.

The old, unexplainable loyalty to this man whom he had not seen for fifteen years returned.

Had he been duped by Burt and his daughter? His defiant look gave way to one of hesitation, of doubt, of dread.

His father watched him closely.

“Come, my boy,” he said gently, “tell me about it.”

And Lawrence, speaking rapidly, rushing past details, giving only the main points of what he knew, of what he had heard, told of his experiences of the last month, of why he had come back to Chicago.

As he spoke it dawned upon him that Burt’s story, as told by Uarda, may have been a flimsy tale to conceal something else.

He could not believe, as he looked at his father’s face, gentle, radiating kindness, that he could have been guilty of what Burt had declared.

Mr. Willson’s face brightened as the story progressed, and, at its end, he smiled across the table at the young man.

“Son, I think I understand now, although I am not certain. The only thing I am certain of is that I am not the man Burt spoke of. But I think I know who he is. Wait a moment.”

He pressed a button, and the nervous little man who had been standing at the door awaiting a call ever since Lawrence had burst past him, immediately entered the room.

Mr. Willson gave a quick order, and a moment later the little man returned with several volumes.

Mr. Willson turned to several pages in each. As he closed the last there was a look of satisfaction in his eyes.

“You may go,” he said to his secretary, and then, after the door had closed: “It is as I thought, Larry.

“Burt’s story is true, but the man you are after is William Wright Wilson, spelled with one L.

“He answers Burt’s description, and I have just found by looking up their addresses in these old directories, that Burt lived on Sheridan Road at the time of his disappearance, and that this Wilson then, as now, occupied the house next door.”

Lawrence’s first sensations were of joy, joy because he knew he could return to Uarda.

Then came shame with the realization that he had wronged his father. He bowed his head, and slipped down in his chair.

“I am sorry, sir,” he said at last. “I beg your pardon. I never should have believed.”

“That’s all right, my boy, for it is forgotten,” said his father gently.

Then, after a moment in which he studied the young man across the table, mentally inventoried the wide shoulders, the square chin and broad forehead, in which he remembered the forcefulness, the determination of the boy’s attack of only a few minutes before, he went on, seriously.

“Larry, now that we have met, now that you have become a man, I am going to tell you some things which I never intended to tell, which I never had hoped to be able to tell you personally. Do you wish me to go on?”

Lawrence nodded.

“If I am not guilty of what you thought of me in this Burt affair, I am guilty of something that has brought to me, perhaps to you, and to another, a sorrow which, instead of decreasing with the years, has constantly grown greater.

“I know, my boy, why you have refused to have anything to do with me. You believed I irreparably wronged your mother. I did not believe so, God knows, at the time, but, since her death, I have known that I did.

“Perhaps you have only a vague idea of what happened, of what it was about I will begin at the beginning.

“I believed, when you were a small boy, and I based my belief on what I thought to be indisputable facts, that your mother was not a true wife, a true mother.

“Wait,” as Lawrence’s face whitened beneath the tan and intense anger blazed from his eyes. “Wait, Larry, and bear with me a moment, for the telling of this hurts me more than you can know.

“My ideas of personal loyalty, uprightness and honesty forbade my compromising with my love for her. I allowed her, no, I compelled her, to get a divorce.

“I went too far in making it easy for her, and you were given into her keeping. I had not intended that. I laid my plans to get control of you and then, two years after the divorce your mother died.”

Mr. Willson stopped and looked at the little object on the desk before him.

The anger disappeared from Lawrence’s eyes when he saw the abject misery in his father’s face.

The older man controlled himself with an effort and went on.

“The day after she died I learned, inn a most unexpected way, that what I had believed of her had been absolutely untrue, that I had wronged the purest, most wonderful woman that ever lived.

“They told me, Larry, that she died of a broken heart. She, the innocent victim, suffered until she died; and I, with a remorse greater than is the lot of only a few, had to go on alone.

“I wanted you then, Larry, in those first years; but I could not take the necessary steps. I saw that your refusal to come was a just punishment, one that I must bear to the end and I resolved that you never would come except voluntarily.

“I resolved never to tell you what I have just said, for I had been wrong, and I would take what my own obstinacy and unfaithfulness had brought upon me.”

He stopped and again looked at the little object on his desk.

When he resumed it was as a broken old man, his voice listless, his crushed attitude pathetic.

“I suppose, now that you cannot get what you want, you will go out of my life as suddenly as you have entered it. I know how you loved your mother, and what you must have thought of me.

“But, my dear boy, your love for her has been no greater than mine in all these years when it has been too late. If you are going, go quietly, and don’t say good-by,” and his head fell forward on the folded arms on the desk.

Lawrence was moved as never before. He started instinctively to his feet and strode around the table.

As he reached his father’s chair he stopped, for from the little object on the desk looked out the sweet, sad face of his mother.

He looked at it a moment, and then his arms went around the bowed shoulders on the desk.

“Don’t, dad; don’t! I’m never going to say good-by!”

“Hopkins, I want you to know my son, Lawrence,” cried Mr. Willson, bursting from his office.

The private secretary gasped, as did the entire office force.

Never had they seen Mr. Willson like this, a jovial, beaming, happy man.

“I’m gone for the rest of the day,” he said as Lawrence shook hands with the astonished little man. “Don’t even try to find me.”

“Let’s get out of this stuffy place,” Lawrence had said in his father’s private office.

“The car’s at the curb,” his father beamed, and fifteen minutes later they were entering Lincoln Park.

“What do you know about this Wilson, father?” Lawrence asked as they sped along.

“He’s a bad one in his personal life, his business, every way. There are ugly stories floating around about him, but no one ever seems able to down him.

“He has wonderful business ability, although most of his attention is confined to the wheat-pit. He’s one of those who started with a shoestring.

“Perhaps I can point him out to you this noon. He is a member of the Union League. I live at the club.”

“Dad, I’ve got to get that evidence. How will I go about it? I believe I’ll walk into his office and hold him up with a gun.”

Mr. Willson glanced at the determined face of his son and smiled happily.

“You still want to right that wrong?” he asked.

Lawrence flushed and did not answer, nor was he prepared when his father asked:

“Are you sure you want her, boy?”

“I sure do, dad,” he said.

Mr. Willson was thoughtful for a moment.

As they turned out of the park and dashed north along Sheridan Road, he turned suddenly to Lawrence and placed a hand on the young man’s knee.

“Larry, you and I’ll break that fellow and make him beg, and we’ll clear Burt of this blackmailer.”

Lawrence did not speak, but he reached out and took his father’s hand and held it. After a minute he said:

“You and I together, dad.”

“That’s the fellow over in the corner,” said Mr. Willson in the club cafe that noon; and Lawrence saw a man as large as himself, with thick, black hair, a mustache that curled slightly upward at the ends, a jovial smile on his slightly florid face.

He was talking gaily with a companion, a much younger man, and nothing in his appearance or actions indicated the character Mr. Willson had described.

A moment later Lawrence looked again. The conversation between Wilson and his companion evidently had taken a serious turn, and the elder man’s smile had vanished.

When the other ceased speaking Wilson’s entire expression changed. His lips curled back from his big, white teeth; his eyes were like those of an angry dog.

Lawrence shivered as he looked.

“That fellow is a fiend, dad,” he said. “I’d like to meet him up in the woods.”

The young fellow’s hands clenched as he thought of Uarda, and again looked at the man in the corner.

A feeling of hatred more intense than any he had ever known, even believed to be possible, surged over him.

“Easy—easy, Larry,” said his father quietly. “You are in a city now, not in a wilderness. We have other methods here. Wait until after lunch, and we will go to my rooms and talk things over.”

“As I told you, Wilson, generally lunges hard on the market,” said Mr. Willson after he and Lawrence had gone upstairs.

“In the last ten years I have speculated a great deal myself. I generally have kept under cover, and my operations are not widely known. I did so more as a diversion than anything else, something to keep me fully occupied, to help me forget.

“Twice I have been in pools in which Wilson was the leading spirit. The fellow has an uncanny way of forecasting even weather conditions, and his success is a byword in La Salle Street.

“As a result of my operations, I have organized an efficient reporting bureau, which affords me much valuable information, and, as the saying is, I am pretty well on the inside.

“Now, I know that Wilson is planning a big campaign, one greater than he has ever attempted before. I know that he intends to bear the market; that he believes this year’s wheat crop is to be a record-breaker.

“My own observations and information do not lead me to this belief. Were it not that my information as to Wilson’s intentions is so authentic I would believe that he intends to cover secretly. He has a big following, because of past successes, and it would be like him to lead his flock down a blind alley.

“Perhaps you do not know that I have piled up quite a few dollars. I have done so merely to be doing something, and I never have used what I have made.

“This is the first opportunity I have had, Larry, and I will stake all I have on this deal; and it is so much that this fellow and his crowd can’t break me. If things turn out as he expects, nothing can save us. But I am not afraid of that.

“I will keep out of this on the surface. You will be the man before the public. They may connect us, but we will both deny it.

“At the same time all the experienced information, and knowledge I have will be yours, and I will arrange with my bankers to keep you supplied with the necessary funds.

“You had better open a suite of offices and get an office force. I will have Hopkins attend to that. Just keep mum; do as I tell you, and we will put this fellow so far under he won’t come up again.

“He will have to come to us, and we will show no mercy until that evidence is in our hands.

“He has gone so far, has risen so high, that he never will let loose of his money if he can help it. Rather than lose it he will give up all that he has against Burt.”

The succeeding weeks Lawrence found to be the busiest of his life.

His buying campaign started quietly, slowly, as obscurely as possible, soon began to attract attention, to be felt in a market that had been steadily falling.

The first week in August he doubled his operations, but the price went down and down, pressed by the most favorable reports ever received from the northwest.

“Dad, it looks bad,” Lawrence said to his father one evening when they were holding their secret nightly conference.

“The bottom is going to drop out of things, and, as we stand to-day, without buying another bushel, we are in for a loss of a little over two millions.”

“We can stand it, and a lot more,” said his father.

“Yes, but we are merely pouring money into the pockets of this fellow and his crowd. I read in the papers this morning that Wilson has bought a yacht, the largest on the lakes; and he was quoted as saying that, after he had cleaned up, he was going down the lakes, on through the St. Lawrence and around to the gulf.”

“The game is not played yet, boy. I have every faith in my information bureau, and I know the crop is not going to be what they think.

“Besides, this fellow is due for a fall, and I have a hunch that it is coming soon.”

Despite his father’s optimism, Lawrence became more discouraged.

He could not pin his father down to better reasons for his belief than a “hunch” that “things had to turn.”

On the other hand, his father advised heavier buying.

“But, dad,” objected Lawrence, “the crop reports are sending the price lower and lower. There is no telling where they will land.”

“Well, we can pay for it, and a lot more. Better do as I say.”

And the next day when reports were received of greatly increased acreage in Argentina, when it was learned that Russia was digging old cradles and reapers from forgotten corners to handle its immense crop, prices took a tumble that placed the Willson obligations close to five million dollars.

The success of the Wilson crowd and the abnormally low price of the world’s greatest foodstuff began to attract newspaper attention to Lawrence.

So quietly had he been at work it was not until the end of the first week in August that his identity and the extent of his operations became known.

Denials by himself and his father that they were related, or connected in a business way, enveloped the man in mystery.

He was snapped on the street by newspaper photographers, and his picture was printed all over the United States.

Who he was, where he came from, no one knew, and every one wondered.

His presence of only five weeks on La Salle Street and his refusal to talk with any one led to all sorts of stories.

Many declared they believed he was only a figurehead for big eastern interests, for where else could he get such large sums as he had deposited with his brokers?

Others, noting the tanned face and hands, still rough from exposure, shouted loudly that he was a returned Klondike king, come to have a little fling with his easily acquired gold.

Newspapers took him up and devoted special Sunday stories to him, wondrous tales of his adventures in the frozen north.

“A Jack London hero in real life,” one paper called him.

Another journal, guessing more accurately than it knew, declared that he was a son of William W. Willson; that they had been estranged, and that, with a fortune gained in Alaskan gold fields, the young man had returned to attack his father through the market.

This paper pictured the elder Willson raking from under the wheat-pit the golden nuggets that the son was shoveling in from Klondike.

Most of the papers declared, however, that the elder Willson was not interested in the market and played it up as a battle between William W. Wilson and Lawrence.

“Single-L” and “Double-L” became the popular designation for the warring giants in wheat.

Lawrence soon found that the publicity in itself not only was annoying, but that it opened new sources of annoyance.

Preachers inveighed against his gambling, his wanton waste.

Beggars wrote letters and called at his offices, believing that one who could risk millions could easily give dollars.

Charitable institutions sent representatives, imploring him to cease his operations and place his money where it would accomplish something for the good of humanity.

Stories were printed of wild extravagances. These brought him into the prayers of preachers throughout the country, and he was held up to the youth of the land as an example of profligacy.

But the steady dropping of the market, the reaching of the six-million mark in the obligations of his father, drew Lawrence’s entire attention to the market.

One night at their conference he openly rebelled.

“Wait a day or two,” his father said. “This can’t go on forever. I learned to-day that this ‘Single-L,’ as the papers call him, and his crowd, have covered practically all our bets.”

“Yes,” said Lawrence, “they are so confident that he and several friends left to-night on his yacht for a cruise up the lake.

“A man told me this morning that it took two drays to get the champagne on board. I wish we could hit them while they are away.”

The next day high winds, hail, cloud bursts, and unseasonable cold sweat down upon the Northwest and devastated the wheat-growing States and provinces of Canada.

Every one remembers that memorable fall. Wheat jumped at a bound to record figures.

The scene in the pit was unrivaled in the history of Chicago. Fortunes were made and unmade by the tick of a telegraph-key.

Many believed the first reports exaggerated, and that the price would tumble when the excitement abated. But investigation and later reports only served to send prices higher.

The storm had been more thorough than at first reported, and, closely following, came the news of the Russian revolution, of so mighty an uprising of the people that crops were left rotting in the fields while the people flocked to the defense of their liberty.

If Lawrence had thought that “Single-L” departed on his pleasure-trip leaving his operations in the hands of subordinates, the young man was mistaken.

News of the crisis was sent to the yacht by wireless, and the craft immediately put in at Marinette, whence a special train hurried Wilson and his crowd to Chicago.

But their efforts were as fruitless as though they had remained on the lake.

The second day after his return Wilson was ruined. He knew it, and he knew with whom he had to settle.

“Drop in and see me before lunch,” he phoned Lawrence.

When the young man knew who was speaking his grip on the receiver tightened, his face became pale.

It was the nearest to a personal contact he had come with this man, and his revulsion made speech impossible.

“We’ll go down to the club for lunch,” Wilson added.

“No,” Lawrence said, when he felt that he could control himself; “if you wish to see me, you can find me here,” and he hung up the receiver.

Fifteen minutes later Wilson was announced. He entered smiling.

Good fellowship and geniality, which had won him many friends, despite his reputation, manifested itself in word and action.

“How are you, ‘Double-L’?” he smiled, extending his hand and stepping quickly to the big, flat-topped desk behind which Lawrence was sitting.

The younger man did not take his gaze from the other’s face, did not extend his hand, nor rise.

“Sit down,” was all he said.

Wilson’s smile lessened, and he looked sharply at Lawrence, endeavoring to detect what might lie behind his manner.

“Come, come,” he said, “there is no use in kicking me just because I am down. A little battle such as we have had should not affect our personal relations.”

“Where do you stand?” Lawrence asked, disregarding the other’s words.

“On my uppers,” laughed Wilson, still endeavoring to place the interview on a friendly footing.

“If I turn the screws the least bit, you are stripped clean?”

“I think that expresses it. The greatest piece of luck that ever happened has made you the greatest little fortune-wrecker of the age.”

“What would you say if I did not turn them—did not strip you clean?”

Wilson eyed the other sharply before replying.

“I’d say you were an idiot—and a prince.”

“I’ll let you off on one condition, and that is—”

“Anything you name—”

“Very well. Deliver to me this afternoon every scrap of evidence you have against Franklin Burt, every bit of it, and agree to sign affidavits I have prepared, and I will let you off with enough to allow you to maintain your present position and get a fresh start in the pit.”

“I don’t believe I understand what you are driving at.”

Lawrence could contain himself no longer.

He jumped to his feet, leaned far over the desk, and shook his clenched fist in the face of the other.

His eyes blazed, his face was contorted with passion.

“You contemptible, blackmailing cur!” came from between his clenched teeth. “I ought to wring you dry and throw you on the scrap-heap, and then take you out and give you the worst beating any man ever had.

“I ought to show you up for what you are, to make it so hot for you that no place where a white man lives will be safe for you.

“And, if you even so much as dare to evade doing what I say you have got to do, I will give you the worst man-handling any one ever received in addition to making this country too hot for you.

“Now,” he resumed after he had sat down, “bring that evidence this afternoon. All of it, and a complete statement of where you stand in the market.”

“So that’s Burt’s game. I thought from the first that you were not playing this alone, but I never suspected that old weakknees had the nerve to attempt anything like this.”

“Mr. Burt knows nothing of this,” said Lawrence. “Will you be here this afternoon?”

“You have a good pinch on the short hair, ‘Double-L’ and I guess you win. But there is this. The papers you win are on my yacht, up Lake Michigan. I expect her in to-night or early to-morrow morning. I can’t deliver them before. Say we meet to-morrow at ten o’clock.”

Lawrence did not believe this, and he searched the other’s eyes.

“I’m telling the truth,” declared Wilson. “I never have let those papers out of my reach before. I generally take them with me wherever I go.

“I was not going to let anything slide. When I got the news of the little flurry we have had I left the boat in such a hurry that I forgot the stuff. I can’t deliver it before to-morrow.”

“Well, I guess you can’t do any damage in the mean time,” said Lawrence. “But,” and his voice rose, “if they are not here at ten to-morrow I’ll tack your hide on the wall. Is that plain?”

“I guess so,” said the other as he started for the door. Turning, with his hand on the knob, he looked at the young fellow behind the desk.

“You’re quite a philanthropic young fellow,” he said. “I don’t quite understand it. Oh, ho, I do now. Say, did you ever see a prettier girl?”

If Lawrence had been angry before his passion now became uncontrollable.

As Wilson had started to leave he had slipped down in his chair, his legs thrown far forward under the desk, his hands in his pockets.

The other’s taunt caught him unprepared, and before he could spring to his feet Wilson had opened the door, slipped out, and closed it.

Lawrence dashed around the desk and to the door, opened it and sprang out only to hear the clank of the elevator into which Wilson had stepped.

Lawrence saw the other’s face flash downwards, a malevolent leer on his wolfish features.

That night the conference between Lawrence and his father lasted until late.

It was nearly one o’clock when Lawrence came out of the Union League and started down Michigan Avenue to his hotel.

His victory won, and won so unexpectedly and overwhelmingly, the blackmailer tightly squeezed and the evidence against Mr. Burt as good as in his hands, he knew that he could start at once for the north.

As he walked slowly along he pictured his trip back up Cat Lake River and down the Severn, his return to the exile’s home, the delivery of the evidence to the astonished Mr. Burt, and then—

Lawrence barely refrained from giving a yip of joy, the wild, shrill yip that often had burst from his throat as his canoe was caught in the swirl of the rapids of a far northern stream.

His great joy, the reaction coming after weeks of toil, worry, and fear, made sleep in a stuffy hotel-room impossible.

“I wish there were some place I could go and yell without being pinched,” he thought, turning back up the avenue.

“Taxi, sir?” and the driver of a car which had been following him stopped his machine at the curb.

“Yes,” said Lawrence, seizing the suggestion of a ride in the open air, “take me up through Lincoln Park.”

As he opened the door and sprang in the auto started.

His foot was still on the step and his lowered head thrust into the dark interior, when a strong arm closed around his neck, and he was jerked forward into the car.

So suddenly had it happened, he had not begun to struggle before a second pair of arms pinioned his, and a handkerchief was pressed over his face.

The last bit of strength in the muscles of his legs and back was exerted, but he was in skilled hands, and he could not even get his face out of the handkerchief.

Slowly his exertions ceased, and he lay quietly across the laps of his captors.

From the thumb-nail scratches he had made in the woodwork, Lawrence estimated that it was the last day of October, or the first day of November.

He did not know whether he had lost a day between the time he had stepped into the taxi on Michigan Avenue, and when he had recovered consciousness on board a vessel which he believed to have been Wilson’s yacht.

For three days he had been held prisoner in a stateroom, port-holes covered so that he could see nothing.

By the trembling of the yacht as she was forced through the water by her powerful engines, he knew that he was traveling swiftly.

But where to, in what direction, under what circumstances, he had no means of knowing. His meals were served in the stateroom by a Japanese steward who could not, or would not, speak English, or indicate that he understood.

Even Lawrence’s threat of physical violence failed to bring more than a grin from the dark-skinned, white-aproned little man.

At the end of what Lawrence believed to be the third day three sailors entered the stateroom, placed handcuffs on his wrists, securely bound his eyes, and led him onto the deck.

He felt the yacht slow to half speed, and then he was picked up and carried down several steps.

Other arms reached for him, and he heard the clanging of bells, the snorting of an engine, and felt the floor upon which he was standing lurch and shudder.

He knew that in the night he had been transferred from the yacht to another and smaller vessel.

He was taken below, and, after his handcuffs had been removed, the two men who had escorted him left and locked the door. Removing the bandage from his eyes, Lawrence found himself in the small cabin of what was evidently a tug.

From the odor he believed it to be a fisherman’s vessel. It was forging ahead sturdily.

For hours Lawrence heard no one, saw no one. Finally he lay down on the bunk and slept.

When he awakened the sun was shining through the window, and the tug was motionless except that it rose and fell on a gentle swell.

Lawrence went quickly to the window and saw that the tug was anchored one hundred yards from a high, rocky shore.

Scrubby Norway and jack-pine grew out of crevices in the rocky cliff and fringed its top.

Beneath the cliff was a little strip of sandy beach which dwindled, at each end, to points as the perpendicular wall and the water met.

He seemed to be in a little bay for the cliff curved outward on either side and he could see nothing else.

A key rattled in the door and a coal-stained man, evidently just from the engine-room, entered.

“Grub’s ready,” he said, and went out, leaving the door open.

Lawrence followed onto the deck. On the side of the tug opposite the cliff was a great stretch of water showing between two rocky points.

The cliff formed almost a complete circle, about a quarter of a mile across, inside this little bay the tug was at anchor.

Far across the stretch of water seen through the opening Lawrence could make out a dim shore-line.

The grimy man who had announced breakfast motioned to him from a low doorway and he entered to find a table spread and three men already seated.

All looked up upon his entrance, but noone spoke. One motioned Lawrence to a vacant seat, and they went on with their meal, ignoring his presence.

The food was rough but good, much like that to which Lawrence had been accustomed in the woods, and he consumed as much as any of the others.

The meal finished, a heavily bearded man at one end of the table motioned to the others to leave.

“I’m goin’ to tell you a few things so’s you won’t do nothin’ foolish,” he said to Lawrence.

“In the first place, I ain’t goin’ to answer none o’ yer questions, so you might as well not ask any. Nor will any of them,” nodding toward the door.

“We’re in a bay at a small island, and no one’s goin’ to come near this place, and we ain’t goin’ to leave it. It’s a good twenty mile to the nearest land, so don’t try no swimmin’.

“You can go ashore when you want, but don’t try nothin’ funny. You’ll be watched, and if you do, I’ll lock you up in the cabin all the time.

“Those fellows is a bad bunch, and they got their orders, an’ I got mine. I never fell down on no job yet, and if you’ll take my advice you’ll do as I say.”

After breakfast two men lowered a boat, attached a line to the tug, and began rowing toward the farther side of the bay.

Lawrence heard the bearded man answer their grumbling by declaring that he did not want to show smoke, and that they would not be seen through the opening.

In the days and weeks that followed Lawrence tried every device he could think of to get the bearded man or any of his crew to talk of their position, of why they were there, of how long they were going to stay.

He spent much time ashore, and learned every nook and corner of the small island.

It was not more than half a mile long and on every side was a steep and rocky cliff. There were a few pines on top.

From its highest point Lawrence could see the distant shore-line to the north. In the other direction there was nothing except the unbroken horizon of the lake.

Many times he saw thin streamers of smoke far to the south, but never did the hulls of vessels rise above the water.

The men on the boat were a surly, evil-minded set, and he spent little time with them.

For hours he walked vigorously the length of the island and back to keep himself in condition.

He thought several times of trying to get away in the yawl at night, but he was watched closely all day, and at night was always locked in his cabin.

After three weeks he gave up trying to escape. This only increased the vigilance of the tug’s crew.

The morning that Lawrence estimated, by the thumb-nail scratches, that November was at hand, he saw the engineer going over his machinery.

All day he worked at it, and that night, a fire was built under the boilers.

At ten o’clock they steamed out of the little harbor’s entrance. Before the departure Lawrence was locked in his cabin.

A half hour after starting Lawrence felt the tug pitching more and more.

He heard the wind whistling, and an hour later felt the craft plunging into the big waves and staggering before the blasts.

At midnight his door was unlocked, and the captain entered.

“We put out to-night to run down the shore and get some supplies,” he said. “We’ve run into a nor’easter, and may not see land again. My orders didn’t extend to wrecks, and I’m goin’ to leave this door open so’s you’ll have a chance with the rest of us.”

“Thanks,” said Lawrence dryly. “Can I go to the wheel-house with you?”

“If you want, but you’ll get wet gettin’ there.”

Lawrence followed him out.

The tug had just plunged her nose into a big wave, and the water cascaded down the deck past the cabin.

The captain waited until it had receded, then hurried forward, Lawrence at his heels.

In the wheel-house the captain took the spokes from a man who went aft, and Lawrence stood behind.

He could see nothing in the blackness, and wondered what prompted the captain to turn the wheel this way and that.

He knew only that they were plunging directly into the storm.

“We’re just movin’, and that’s all,” said the captain after the tug had made a plunge from which Lawrence thought it would not rise.

“If we could keep goin’ for two hours we might run up under the lee shore and ride it out.”

At the end of two hours the captain began to grow nervous, to lose the certainty with which he had formerly twirled the spokes.

Lawrence, looking out on one side, was certain he saw something darker than the blackness which had surrounded them.

Before he could speak there was a shock that threw him violently against the captain, whose head snapped forward and crashed through the window.

The next moment the tug turned over onto one side. Lawrence, when he regained his feet, found that he was standing on the port wall of the cabin.

The sea rushed in through the port door and he felt the icy water around his waist.

Then above his head he saw the sky, and dimly, the captain scrambling up and out through the starboard door. Lawrence immediately followed.

Once on top he felt the tug slide backward, and the next moment a big wave picked him up and carried him clear.

Before he could recover his equilibrium and strike out he suddenly found himself on the surface in comparatively quiet water.

As he started to swim he felt the rush of another wave lifting him and then hurling him forward.

As it receded and he again rose to the surface, he shook the water from his eyes and tried to look about him.

He could see nothing, only hear the tumbling of the waves. Again and again great, curling waves hurled him forward. Buried often in the boiling water, he got air with difficulty.

He did not try to swim, only to keep his head above water.

Then, suddenly dropped by a wave, he felt his feet touch solid earth. The next moment he was covered with spray.

He struggled in the smother, and finally, exhausted, was hurled onto a sandy beach.

With a last effort he staggered to his feet and hurried forward, just as the next roller flung its tentacles at his feet.

He tripped, stumbled, and fell headlong against something that was soft, that grunted as he struck, and then exclaimed:

“What the devil’s your hurry?”

Lawrence sat up on the sand.

Dimly he could see that a man stood beside him.

“Did you come by water, air, or land?” the man asked.

“Water” said Lawrence, rising to his feet.

“You’re luckier than any one I’ve seen in a long while. Old Superior ain’t that decent as a rule.”

“Superior!” exclaimed Lawrence. “Is this Lake Superior?”

“Guess you thought it was the Atlantic Ocean the way she’s pilin’ up to-night,” and, as the significance of Lawrence’s question struck him, “Didn’t you know where you be?”

“No more idea that a rabbit,” said Lawrence. “Where am I?”

“On Heron Bay, of course.”

“But where is Heron Bay?”

“On the north shore of Lake Superior, about one hundred and fifty miles east of Port Arthur. How’s it come you don’t know where you are?”

“I haven’t known for two months said Lawrence absently, for he was thinking that it was a question of days before he could get to Chicago.

“I’ve been kept a prisoner on a boat since the last of August.”

“Didn’t know they was any pirates on these lakes,” said the other skeptically. “How come that?”

“How far is it to a railroad?” asked Lawrence, disregarding the question and beginning to make his plans.

“Peninsula ain’t mor’n two miles from here.”

“What road is that on?”

“C.P.R.”

“When does the next train go west?”

“ ’Bout six in the mornin’.”

“What time is it now? Can I make it?”

“Sure; its only ’bout three o’clock. But you’re wet, an’ you’d better come up and dry out before you start.”

Lawrence followed the man across the beach and up the shore to the timber, at the edge of which was a small shack.

While he dried his clothes beside the little stove, which the man soon had red-hot, his host kept up a rapid series of questions and observations.

“Most sudden storm I ever see here,” he said. “Never a sign of it at dark. Lucky I waked up and heard it, an’ come down to pull back some nets that I had dryin’ on the beach, or you wouldn’t knowed where you were.”

Lawrence searched his pockets and found that the thirty dollars and some small change he had the night he left the Union League was still there.

At five o’clock he was dry. Taking a five-dollar bill from his pocket, he handed it to the man.

“Take me to the station, will you?” he asked.

The fisherman fingered the money for a minute.

“Isn’t that enough?” asked Lawrence.

“I was thinkin’ it was too much for a little trip like that, but if you’re satisfied, I be,” and he picked up his hat and led the way out.

At the station Lawrence wakened a sleepy operator and sent this message to his father:

“Get me on long-distance at Northern Hotel, Port Arthur, at noon to-day.”

It was a little before twelve when Lawrence registered at the hotel.

As he finished writing his name the telephone-operator turned and called: “Long-distance for Mr. Lawrence Willson. He here?”

“Yes,” exclaimed Lawrence excitedly. “Where?”

“Booth three,” yawned the girl, returning to a magazine.

At first Lawrence had trouble hearing his father. Then the “Hello!” came clearly.

“Hello, dad!” cried Lawrence. “I’m at Port Arthur, Ontario. Was kidnapped on Michigan Avenue that last night after I left the club.

“Shanghaied on Wilson’s yacht, I think, and taken to Lake Superior where I’ve been on an island ever since, They took me off and the boat was wrecked. What’s happened?”

“I thought it was that fellow,” replied his father. “I’ve been through this city with a fine-tooth comb, but I never thought of the lake. I suspected that blackmailer, and I went to him and demanded where you were. He only laughed.

“I had trouble getting charge of your affairs, because we had kept our connection secret, but I did, and I squeezed that cur so hard he didn’t have a thing left.

“I just finished up last week, but in making the settlement I couldn’t get a thing out of him. I had him shadowed all the time, and last week, five days ago, he started for Canada.

“I traced him as far as Winnipeg, where the shadow lost him. I’ve figured out that he’s bound for Burt’s place, to get some more money out of him.”

“When did he start?” interrupted Lawrence.

“Five days ago.”

“Listen, dad,” said Lawrence. “Wire me one thousand dollars here, at this hotel at once. Make them rush it. There’s no time to lose.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to start at once for Lake Severn. I’ve got to beat that fellow to it.”

He tried to say more, but the connection was broken. He hung up the receiver and walked to the desk.

“Where is a sporting-goods store?” he asked. When the clerk had given him the direction Lawrence continued:

“I’m Lawrence Willson, of Chicago. My father is William W. Willson, of Chicago. I have just been talking with him over the long-distance. You can verify that. He is going to wire me one thousand dollars. I want you to identify me.”

“Surely, Mr. Willson. I knew you soon as you registered from your pictures, you know. They’ve been looking for you all over the States. Gave you up as dead. We will be glad to do anything for you.”

Lawrence stopped the question trembling on the clerk’s lips by thanking him and leaving the hotel.

There was a light fall of snow as he walked up the street, and he shivered in the cold northeast wind, for he still wore the summer suit he had on the night he was kidnapped.

At the store he looked first at firearms, for he had a feeling that he might have use for them before the month was ended.

After listening to the clerk’s rambling arguments, he selected the things he had in mind when he entered.

They were a double-action revolver, with a seven and a half inch barrel, and chambered for the .38-40 cartridge; a cartridge belt, and open topped holster. He took a repeating rifle, also a .38-40, and one hundred rounds of ammunition.

Then he selected a pair of long, narrow snowshoes, a lightweight lean-to tent, closed at the ends, but open on one side; two big pack-sacks, a four-point blanket, heavy woolen socks, underwear, trousers, and shirt, a stiff-brimmed felt hat, a buckskin shirt, heavy woolen gloves, buckskin mittens, a heavy pocket-knife, two or three cooking pails, and a frying-pan sacks to hold food, and an ax.

The talkative clerk was hushed by the seeming recklessness of the young man’s purchases, but he was not wise enough to realize the wisdom of a selection that did not conform to the dictates of the sporting outfitters’ catalogues.

“Please deliver these to the Northern Hotel, C.O.D., at four o’clock.”

At the hotel he had lunch, but not until after he had written this telegram to his friend, Ed Randolph, owner of the general store at Raleigh, a station on the headwaters of the Manitou River, two hundred miles west:

“Get me good man, red or white, ready leave three months’ northern trip. Start to-morrow morning. Have grub, Peterborough canoe, toboggan, dogs, ready.”

At four o’clock his money order came, and the clerk got the cash for him immediately.

As he went in to dinner a telegram was handed to him. It read:

“Outfit ready. You’re lucky. Got old Bonnie.” Ed.

Lawrence smiled. He could not have been more lucky.

“Bonnie” was a full-blood Ojibway, whose real name was Bon-ee-quay-gee-zick.

Two years before, when the Indian had been arrested for drunkenness, Lawrence had saved him from a jail sentence by paying his fine. Since then he had had no truer friend in the northland.

After dinner Lawrence wrote a long letter to his father. His train was to leave at eleven o’clock.

Clothed in his new woolen outfit, he was ready to leave the hotel when he received this telegram from his father:

Just received an unsigned letter, postmarked Winnipeg, reading: “You and your cub got the money, but he will never get the girl.”

When Lawrence stepped from the pullman at Raleigh at five o’clock the next morning, Bon-ee-quay-gee-zick was the only person on the little platform.

“B’jou,” said the Indian, a broad grin on his face as he stretched forth his hand.

They walked down the platform, picked up the two pack-sacks thrown from the baggage-car, and went down the little street to Randolph’s store.

“Where in tarnation you in such a hurry to go?” growled the fat storekeeper, smiling as he spoke, for Lawrence had been in the woods near there for two years, and was a good customer.

“I’m making the fastest trip ever, straight north to Lake Severn,” said Lawrence. “Let’s put up the grub.”

“Better get breakfast first; the grub’s all ready,” said Randolph, still growling. “What’s all the rush about?”

“I can’t tell you now, Ed, but maybe I can when I get back. You haven’t seen any one start north from here in the last few days—a white man?”

“No. Nobody I know of’s fool enough to start at this time of year. Why, man, the bays are liable to freeze the first night out. It’s winter up here now. You may get to St. Joseph Lake in a canoe, but the chances are ten to one that you won’t.

“And you been here enough to know there’s generally a week or ten days when a man can’t hardly travel at all, between the first freeze and the time when you can cross big lakes on the ice.”

“I’ve got to take the chance, Ed, and start anyhow. I wish it were two weeks later, but I can’t wait an hour.

“Well, you’re lucky in one thing, old Bonnie’s got his tepee and family up on the north shore of Lac Seul, on the east end. It’s a long hundred miles and if you have luck, you may make it before things freeze tight.

“He’s got a good team of dogs there, and a toboggan. Your best way is to make his camp by canoe, and then strike north overland, if there’s enough snow. You’d make better time that way than by goin’ up Cat Lake River.

“I’ve got a new sixteen-foot Peterborough down at the river. Your grub, enough for three months, if you can shoot some meat, is all ready. Come an’ get breakfast.”

Like all meals in the north country, the breakfast was eaten in silence.

Men who work out of doors in the cold of the north have no time for conversation when at a table.

After they had finished Lawrence stopped only long enough to buy a pair of cloth-topped moose-hide moccasins, settle with Randolph, and write a short note to his father.

Ten minutes later he and Bonnie were paddling up-stream.

It was nearly seven o’clock when they started.

With only a stop at noon to boil tea and eat a lunch Randolph had prepared for them, they kept traveling until long after dark, which was made possible by the Indian’s intimate knowledge of the lakes and streams.

As they made camp snow began to fall. Lawrence was pleased. They had made fifty miles that day, and he knew that, with snow falling, it would not become cold enough to freeze.

With good luck and long hours the next day they would make Bonnie’s teepee.

Bonnie wakened Lawrence at four o’clock. Before five, with still two hours of darkness, they were in the canoe.

Before noon they passed the mouth of Sturgeon River, and just before dark they had crossed to the north side of Lac Seul and were headed north of east, a fresh west breeze behind them.

It had cleared up in the forenoon, and night came with a temperature far below freezing.

They had stopped twice for meals that day, and at eight o’clock they pulled up to a point for a last lunch before the long paddle that lay ahead of them that night.

A new moon set as they started again, the stars shone clearly, and the long, brilliant rays of the northern lights shot to the zenith.

For hours they paddled. The breeze died away. Lawrence, his back and arms sore from the unaccustomed labor, his toes cold, and his legs cramped, had difficulty in keeping the pace.

At midnight they passed a long point on the north shore and started across a big open stretch.

Lawrence, to keep awake, was forced to resort to several expedients, such as counting the paddle-strokes, humming songs, and using all the Ojibway he knew in talking to Bonnie.

“I guess pretty soon now,” the Indian said after a long silence.

Half an hour later they heard the barking of dogs.

Turning a point into a bay, there was a tiny, silvery tinkling along the sides of the canoe.

At first Lawrence did not understand. Then it grew louder, and he knew that the surface of the bay was freezing.

When one hundred yards from shore they were forced to stop paddling. Lawrence, leaning forward over the bow broke the ice with his paddle, while Bonnie shoved the craft slowly along.

It was three o’clock when they landed.

Five minutes later Lawrence, wrapped in his four-point, was sound asleep beside the fire in the teepee.

“No good start now, I guess,” said Bonnie when he wakened Lawrence at daylight.

The young man pushed back the blanket-flap over the teepee door and saw that the bay was frozen over, and that ice stretched far out into the lake.

More snow had fallen than farther south on the railroad. A cloudy sky promised still more snow.

“I guess fix ’boggan; get ready to-day,” said the Indian, who was busy with a dog-harness. “Maybe snow. To-morrow, march on.”

Despite his impatience to be off. Lawrence was glad of the opportunity to rest.

He knew what lay before him, and that the four-hundred-mile journey would require all his strength.

He went through the pack-sacks and placed in the small bags he had purchased at Port Arthur enough food for three weeks.

The remainder he left with Bonnie’s squaw. They filled a sack with dried moosemeat and dried fish for the dogs.

The afternoon both men spent in resting. At four o’clock it began to snow. When they went to sleep, at eight o’clock, four inches had fallen, and the storm was increasing.

In the morning the snow was a rod deep and still falling.

“Just my luck,” growled Lawrence forgetting that the luck had been with him ever since the tug had left the island where he had spent the last two months; “we’re getting so much snow we can’t make any sort of time.”

“Squaw, she say white man, Indian two canoes, go by St. Joseph Lake two three days,” said Bonnie as they ate breakfast.

“Did they stop here?” demanded Lawrence.

“Yes, stop, buy moose.”

“Ask her white man big, black hair,” said Lawrence.

Bonnie spoke to the squaw in Ojibway, and then nodded to Lawrence.

“Yes, I guess big man. No paddle. Three Indians paddle. Got dogs, ’boggan, lots grub, I guess.”

Lawrence knew that Wilson had at least three days’ start, and that his traveling by canoe would enable him to reach the mouth of Cat Lake River before the freeze-up.

Once in the stream he could travel several days by water before being forced to take to the ice.

It meant at least four days’ start in a four-hundred-mile race.

When the team was harnessed and all ready, Lawrence started down toward the lake.

“I guess go this way,” said Bonnie, pointing north. “Me know river maybe fifteen miles, small lakes, go fast, Cat Lake River.”

Lawrence did not dispute the Indian, who was thoroughly acquainted with the country and all the possible shortcuts.

If they could go directly north and strike Cat Lake River, they might gain a day or two.

But there was no fast travel that day, or the next. The snow was more than a foot deep, and soft.

Their snowshoes were useless, and they plowed along, both ahead of the dogs.

It was the first travel of the season, of that kind, for either dogs or men.

The animals made such slow work of it that Bonnie and Lawrence each took a pack to lighten the toboggan.

The next day it was warmer, and the snow thawed and made the going harder than ever.

They toiled on from early morning until long after dark eating four meals.

Each night Lawrence tumbled to sleep in the lean-to without lighting his fire.

His summer in the city, and his confinement on the island, had softened his muscles, and the Indian, hard as hickory, traveled as fast in the last hours of their fourteen-hour days as in the first.

The morning of the fifth day they carried along the banks of a small stream, turned a bend, and found themselves on Cat Lake River.

On the snow covering the ice along the edge of the stream they saw the tracks of men, dogs, and a toboggan.

“I guess maybe two days,” said Bonnie, after examining the trail, and he sprang into a trot, the dogs galloping at his heels.

They made good time that day and the next four days, but never, after an examination of the trail, did Bonnie offer any encouragement by deducing from the tracks that their quarry was more than two days ahead.

Each night it grew colder, and the water, in the quiet stretches, soon was frozen across.

There would be good going along the edge for miles, and then a series of rapids would necessitate taking to the wooded banks, through thick, small growth, swamps, and tangled windfalls.

One day a succession of rapids permitted only five miles for the entire day and Lawrence’s impatience increased. His strength and powers of endurance grew, however.

After they had been six days on the trail he was able to keep Bonnie’s pace without difficulty.

The eighth day they made the long portage from Cat Lake into the head waters of the Severn.

That morning Bonnie declared that Wilson was no more than a day and a half ahead. But in the forenoon a heavy snowfall began.

It did not cease until forty-two hours later.

As the soft, fluffy snow increased in depth the snowshoes were brought out.

At the end of the second day of new snow both Lawrence and Bonnie complained of sharp pains in their thighs and shins.

But they did not lessen their toil, and day after day pushed on down river now on the better open going on the ice and then through the brush, swamp and windfalls.

A day and a half after the heavy snow they struck the packed trail of Wilson and his Indians, and Lawrence knew they had gained a half-day.

Two days later this lead had been cut down to seven hours, but Lawrence instead of being elated began to despair.

The mouth of the river, which was only five miles from Burt’s house was no more than fifty miles ahead.

The point where he had been upset with Hardy in the spring, and where he had found Uarda on a rock in the rapids, had been passed more than a day before.

“You go Burt’s house?” asked Bonnie, halting that afternoon at the mouth of a small stream entering the river from the east.

Lawrence nodded, surprised that the Indian should have suspected his destination—should even have heard of it. Bonnie turned up the tributary without a word, and Lawrence protested.

“River much crooked, lots rapids,” said Bonnie without stopping. “Little river short way.”

That night they camped at the head of the stream, and early in the morning crossed a low divide and plowed through the snow on the frozen surface of a river that flowed directly north.

All that forenoon they followed its course, and Lawrence began to doubt the wisdom of having left the beaten trail on the Severn. But he said nothing until the mid-afternoon lunch when he asked Bonnie how much farther it was to Lake Severn.

“I guess pretty soon, now,” said Bonnie. An hour later they swung around a bend and out onto the lake.

Across to the east, on a point, Lawrence saw Burt’s house.

He looked back to the northwest toward the mouth of Severn River. There was nothing in sight on the frozen surface of the lake. He knew he had gained fully half a day by the short cut.

He had—won! Then he heard Bonnie say:

“I guess um too late.”

The Indian pointed toward the house.

There, three miles away, Lawrence saw a dog-team and four men racing along, not more than a quarter of a mile from the house.

“Come on, Bonnie, quick,” Lawrence cried, snatching up the rifle from the toboggan and pulling his holster around to examine his revolver. He passed the rifle to Bonnie, saying:

“May be big fight!”

The Indian’s eyes danced, and he sprang into a lope, Lawrence following.

Thirty minutes later, when Lawrence, panting, left the ice and climbed the point in front of the house, there was no one to be seen.

He looked eagerly at the wide library window, but he could not see through the glass thickly coated with frost.

Telling Bonnie to leave the dogs and follow, he kicked off his snowshoes and ran for the verandah.

Pausing a moment at the door, he heard voices. Cautiously opening the door, he looked in. The long, wide hall was empty.

Motioning to Bonnie to follow, he stepped softly to the library door and stooped to the keyhole.

“This is not like one of the old touches,” he heard Wilson say. “I have forgotten there ever was so little money as five thousand dollars. I want five hundred thousand this time, and not a cent less.”

“You will never get any more,” Lawrence heard Mr. Burt say, and he was glad to note the quiet determination in his tone.

“Oh, I believe I will,” Wilson laughed, “and, moreover, remember that I have an engagement with your daughter here on December 15. This is November 25. I guess we will have time to get out to a priest.”

“She will never go with you,” said Burt quietly.

“Oh, don’t try to delay, although, of course, I don’t care if we are a little late reaching the preacher. The preacher will be only a matter of form—then.”

Lawrence, chilled, and completely ossified by the man’s remark, felt powerless to move.

He heard a low roar from Mr. Burt, a loud smacking crash, Uarda’s scream and the falling of a body to the floor. He threw open the door and sprang in.

Wilson, revolver in hand, stood across the room.

At the sight of the young man he raised his gun and fired. Lawrence rushing toward him, tripped and fell with a crash across Mr. Burt’s body.

Then there was an explosion behind him, and Wilson, his revolver dropping from limp fingers, swayed back against the wall and crumpled into a little heap.

Lawrence, springing to his feet, saw him go down.

Afterward he wondered how so large a man could sink into so small a space.

Turning, he saw Bonnie, his rifle in his hands, smiling in the door.

“I guess all same moose,” he grinned, pointing with the rifle-barrel at Wilson’s body.

A smothered “Oh!” from the window caused Lawrence to spin around in that direction.

Uarda, her face pale, her eyes wide with horror, was staring at him.

Lawrence smiled, and the horror in the girl’s eyes became greater!

“You smile, smile, and your—your father—there—dead!” she cried.

“Father!” exclaimed Lawrence, wonderingly. “Oh, that!” and he pointed at the heap against the wall from under which a little red stream was crawling toward the middle of the floor.

“Why, Uarda, he never was my father. My father is in Chicago, the grandest dad who ever lived. He never knew your father and he helped me to wring this fellow’s neck.”

“Dad, are you hurt?” exclaimed Uarda, and Lawrence turned to see Mr. Burt slowly getting to his feet.

“No, a clean knockout never hurts,” said Mr. Burt smiling. “My boy, I heard what you said, I am glad,” and he held out his hand.

“Thanks,” said Lawrence, not noticing the hand, for he had turned to Uarda.

The girl’s expression had undergone a wonderful change.

There was a smile on her lips, and from her eyes there came a light, a light that had a wondrous glow because it was new, pure; because it had never been there before.

“Uarda!” he exclaimed, striding toward her.

For the second time in her life the blood pushed out through the tan. Her eyelids drooped, and she held out her hands.

“Larry, I’m so glad you came back!”

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.

A cover which is placed in the public domain was created for this ebook.

This novella was published over 4 issues of Maclean’s Magazine beginning in July 1913.

[The end of The Print of the French Heel, by Robert E. Pinkerton]