Stranded in Arcady. Lynde Francis

was possibly a hand-down from some far-away Indian-dodging ancestor: perhaps it would be well first to find out into whose hands they were going to fall.

      The canoe itself told him nothing, and neither did the lading, which included a good store of eatables. There was an air of isolation about the birch-bark which gave him the feeling that it had been beached for some time, and the dry paddles lying inside confirmed the impression. He listened, momently expecting to hear sounds betraying the presence of the owners, but the silence of the sombre forest was unbroken save by the lapping of the little wavelets on the near-by lake shore.

      Realizing that Miss Millington would be waiting for her bread-mixing water, Prime filled the tin and recrossed the small peninsula.

      "I was beginning to wonder if you were lost," said the bread-maker. "Did you have to go far?"

      "No, not very far." Then, snatching at the first excuse that offered: "I saw some berries on the river-bank. Let me have the tin again and I'll see if I can't gather a few before it grows too dark."

      Having thus given a plausible reason for a longer absence, he went back to the canoe to look in the fading light for tracks in the sand. Now that he made a business of searching for them, he found plenty of them; heelless tracks as if the feet that had made them had been shod with moccasins. A little farther down the stream-side there were broken bushes and a small earth-slide to show where somebody had scrambled up to the forest level. Following the trail he soon found himself in a natural clearing, grass-grown and running back from the river a hundred yards or more. In the centre of this clearing he came upon the ashes of five separate fires, disposed in the form of a rude cross.

      Still there was no sign of the canoe-owners themselves, and the discovery of the curiously arranged ash-heaps merely added more mystery to mystery. The fires had been dead for some time. Of this Prime assured himself by thrusting his hand into the ashes. Clearly the camp, if it were a camp, had been abandoned for some hours at least. The gathering dusk warned him that it would be useless to try to track the fire-makers, and he turned to make his way back to the lake shore and supper.

      It was in the edge of the glade, under the gloomy shadow of a giant spruce, that he stumbled blindly over some reluctantly yielding obstacle and fell headlong. Regaining his feet quickly with a nameless fear unnerving him, he stooped and groped under the shadowing tree, drawing back horror-stricken when his hand came in contact with the stiffened arm of a corpse.

      He had matches in his pocket, and he found one and lighted it. His hand shook so that the match went out and he had to light another. By the brief flare of the second match he saw a double horror. Lying in a little depression between two spreading roots of the spruce were the bodies of two men locked in a death-grip. Another match visualized the tragedy in all its ghastly details. The men were apparently Indians, or half-breeds, and it had been a duel to the death, fought with knives.

      IV

      IN THE NIGHT

      Prime made his way to the camp-fire at the lake edge, a prey to many disturbing emotions. Having lived a life practically void of adventure, the sudden collision with bloody tragedy shocked him prodigiously. Out of the welter of emotions he dug a single fixed and unalterable decision. Come what might, his companion must be kept from all knowledge of the duel and its ghastly outcome.

      "Dear me! You look as if you had seen a ghost," was the way the battle of concealment was opened when he came within the circle of firelight. "Did you find any berries?"

      Prime shook his head. "No, it was too dark," he said; "and, anyway, I'm not sure there were any."

      "Never mind," was the cheerful rejoinder. "We have enough without them, and, really, I am beginning to get the knack of the pan-bread. If you don't say it is better this evening – " She broke off suddenly. He had sat down by the fire and was nursing his knees to keep them from knocking together. "Why, what is the matter with you? You are as pale as a sheet."

      "I – I stumbled over something and fell down," he explained hesitantly. "It wasn't much of a fall, but it seemed to shake me up a good bit. I'll be all right in a minute or two."

      "You are simply tired to death," she put in sympathetically. "The long tramp this afternoon was too much for you."

      Prime resented the sympathy. He was not willing to admit that he could not endure as much as she could – as much as any mere woman could.

      "I'm not especially tired," he denied; and to prove it he began to eat as if he were hungry, and to talk, and to make his companion talk, of things as far as possible removed from the sombre heart of a Canadian forest.

      Immediately after supper he began to build another sleeping-shelter, though the young woman insisted that it was ridiculous for him to feel that he was obliged to do this at every fresh stopping-place. None the less, he persevered, partly because the work relieved him of the necessity of trying to keep up appearances. Fortunately, Miss Millington confessed herself weary enough to go to bed early, and after she left him Prime sat before the fire, smoking the dust out of his tobacco-pouch and formulating his plan for the keeping of the horrid secret.

      The plan was simple enough, asking only for time and a sufficient quantity – and quality – of nerve. When he could be sure that his camp-mate was safely asleep he would go back to the glade and dispose of the two dead men in some way so that she would never know of their existence alive or dead.

      The waiting proved to be a terrific strain; the more so since the conditions were strictly compelling. The chance to secure the ownerless and well-stocked canoe was by no means to be lost, but Prime saw difficulties ahead. His companion would wish to know a lot of things that she must not be told, and he was well assured that she would have to be convinced of their right to take the canoe before she would consent to be an accomplice in the taking. This meant delay, which in its turn rigidly imposed the complete effacement of all traces of the tragedy. He was waiting to begin the effacement.

      By the time his tobacco was gone he was quivering with a nervous impatience to be up and at it and have it over with. After the crackling fire died down the forest silence was unbroken. The young woman was asleep; he could hear her regular breathing. But the time was not yet ripe. The moon had risen, but it was not yet high enough to pour its rays into the tree-sheltered glade, and without its light to aid him the horrible thing he had to do would be still more horrible.

      It was nearly midnight when he got up from his place beside the whitening embers of the camp-fire and pulled himself together for the grewsome task. Half-way to the glade a fit of trembling seized him and he had to sit down until it passed. It was immensely humiliating, and he lamented the carefully civilized pre-existence which had left him so helplessly unable to cope with the primitive and the unusual.

      When he reached the glade and the big spruce the moon was shining full upon the two dead men. One of them had a crooking arm locked around the neck of the other. Prime's gorge rose when he found that he had to strain and tug to break the arm-grip, and he had a creeping shock of horror when he discovered that the gripped throat had a gaping wound through which the man's life had fled. In the body of the other man he found a retaliatory knife, buried to the haft, and it took all his strength to withdraw it.

      With these unnerving preliminaries fairly over, he went on doggedly, dragging the bodies one at a time to the river-brink. Selecting the quietest of the eddies, and making sure of its sufficient depth by sounding with a broken tree limb, he began a search for weighting-stones. There were none on the river-bank, and he had to go back to the lake shore for them, carrying them an armful at a time.

      The weighting process kept even pace with the other ghastly details. The men both wore the belted coats of the northern guides, and he first tried filling the pockets with stones. When this seemed entirely inadequate he trudged back to the abandoned canoe and secured a pair of blankets from its lading. Of these he made a winding-sheet for each of the dead men, wrapping the stones in with the bodies, and making all fast as well as he could with strings fashioned from strips of the blanketing.

      All this took time, and before it was finished, with the two stiffened bodies settling to the bottom of the deep pool, Prime was sick and shaken. What remained to be done was less distressing. Going back to the glade he searched until he found the other hunting-knife.