Half awake, Fred made a blind snatch at the rifle that had been across
his lap. It was gone.
The sky was bright with dawn. Ten feet away stood three men with
leveled rifles. Horace and Mac were sitting up, holding their hands
above their heads and looking dazed.
"I said you pups wouldn't bark so loud next time," remarked one of the
newcomers. It was the man that had pretended to be a ranger. With him
was the slim, dark fellow whom they had seen outside the trappers'
shack, and the third was a tall, elderly, bearded man, who looked more
intelligent and more vicious than the others.
None of the boys said anything, but Horace gave Fred a reproachful
glance that almost broke his heart. It was his fault that this had
happened, and he knew it. Tears of rage and shame started to his eyes.
He looked about desperately for a weapon. He would gladly risk his
life to get his companions out of the awkward scrape into which his
negligence had plunged them. But the ranger had taken the boys' rifle,
and the half-breed had picked up the shotgun.
With a grin of triumph the trappers went to the fox cage, peered at the
animals, and talked eagerly in low voices. The boys watched them in
suspense. Were they going to kill the foxes?
Presently two of the men picked up the cage and carried it down to the
river. The light was strong enough now so that Fred could see the bow
of a bark canoe drawn up on the shore. They put the cage into the
canoe. Then the half-breed laid his rifle and the stolen shotgun
beside it, and paddled down the river. The other two men lifted the
boys' Peterboro into the water.
"You aren't going to rob us of our firearms and our canoe, too, are
you?" cried Horace desperately. "You might as well murder us!"
"Guess you won't need the guns," said the third trapper. "You've got
grub, I see, and we durstn't leave you any canoe to foller us up in."
The two men pushed off the Peterboro and followed the birch canoe down
the river at a rapid pace. In two minutes they were out of sight round
a bend.
There was a dead silence. Fred could not meet the eyes of his
companions. He turned away, pretended to look for something, and
fairly broke down.
"Brace up, Fred!" said his brother. "It can't be helped, and we're not
blaming you. It might have happened to any of us."
"If you'd been awake you might have got shot," said Mac, "and that
would have been a good deal worse for every one concerned."
But Fred was inconsolable. Through his tears, he stammered that he
wished he had been shot. They had lost the foxes, they were stranded
and destitute, and they stood a good chance of never getting out alive.
"Nonsense!" said Mac, with forced cheerfulness. "We were in a far
worse fix last winter, and we came out on top."
"The first thing to do is to have some grub," added Horace. "Then
we'll talk about it."
Looking with calculating eyes at the lump of meat, he cut the slices of
venison very thin. There was about twenty pounds left. They roasted
the meat he had cut off, and ate it; then Horace unfolded his pocket
map and spread it on the ground.
They were probably forty miles from the Height of Land. It was twelve
miles across the long carry, and at least forty more to the nearest
inhabited point--almost a hundred miles in all. There was a chance,
however, that they might meet some party of prospectors or Indians.
"It's terribly rough traveling afoot," said Horace. "We could hardly
make it in less than two weeks. Besides, our shoes are nearly gone
now."
"And that piece of venison will never last us for two weeks!" cried
Macgregor.
"Oh, you can often knock down a partridge with a stick," said Horace.
"If we only had a canoe!" Mac exclaimed, with a burst of rage. "I'd
run those thieves down if I had to follow them to Hudson Bay!"
They all agreed on that point, but it was useless to think of following
them without a canoe. The boys would have all they could do to save
their own lives; a hundred-mile journey on foot across that wilderness,
without arms and with almost no provisions, was a desperate undertaking.
"Well, we've got no choice," said Horace, after a dismal silence. "We
must put ourselves on rations of about half a pound of meat a day, and
we'll lay a bee-line course by the compass for the trail over the
Height of Land."
He marked the course on the map, and the boys studied it in silence.
The sun had risen by this time, but the boys were not anxious to break
camp and start on that journey which would perhaps prove fatal to all
of them. They lingered, talking, discussing, hesitating, reluctant to
make the start.
Fred had not contributed a single word to the discussion. He had
barely managed to swallow a little breakfast, and was too miserable to
join in the talk. He knew how slim their chances were; he imagined how
the party would struggle on, growing weaker daily, until--
If only they had a canoe! If only they could run the robbers down and
ambush them in their turn! And as he puzzled on the problem, an
idea--an inspiration--flashed into his mind.
He bent over, and studied the map intently for a second.
"Look! Look here!" he cried, wildly. "What fools we are! We can
overtake those fellows--catch 'em--cut 'em off before they get
anywhere--and get back our grub, and the foxes, and the
canoe--everything--why--"
"What's that? What do you mean?" cried Horace and Mac together.
Fred placed a trembling finger on the map.
"See, this is where we are, isn't it? Those thieves will go down here
to the mouth of the Smoke River, and turn up it to their camp. They
didn't have much outfit with them; so they'll go back to their shanty.
It's about fifty miles round by the way they'll go, but if we cut
straight across country--this way--we'd strike the Smoke in twenty-five
miles, and be there before them."
"I do believe you've hit something, Fred!" Mac exclaimed.
In fact, the Smoke and the Missanabie Rivers made the arms of an acute
angle. Between twenty and thirty miles straight to the northwest would
bring them out on the former stream somewhere in the neighborhood of
"Buck Rapids."
"Let's see!" calculated Horace hurriedly. "They can run down to the
mouth of the Smoke in a few hours from here. After that it'll be
slower work, but they'll have the portage trails that we cut, and they
ought to get up beyond the long lake by this evening. Can we get
across in time to head 'em off?"
"We must. Of course we can!" Fred insisted. "It's our only chance,
and you both know it. We never could get home with our boots gone, and
with the food we have, but this venison will last us across to the
Smoke."
"Patch our boots up with the deerskin!" cried Mac. "We'll ambush 'em.
We'll catch 'em on a hard carry. Only let me get my hands on 'em!"
"Then we haven't a minute to lose!" said Horace.
"Let's be off!" cried Fred, springing up.
First of all, however, they repaired their tattered boots by folding
pieces of the raw deerhide round them and lashing them in place with
thongs. It was clumsy work at the best; but Mac rolled up the rest of
the hide to take with him, in case they should have to make further
repairs.
Horace consulted the map and the compass again, and picked up the lump
of venison, which, with the deerskin, constituted their only luggage.
In less than half an hour from the time Fred had hit upon his plan they
were off, running through the undergrowth on the twenty-five-mile race
to the Smoke River.
None of them knew what sort of country the course would pass over. The
map for that part of the region was incomplete and no more than
approximately accurate, so that the boys were not at all sure that
their guess at the distance to the Smoke River was correct. But they
did know that now that they had started on the race, their lives
depended upon their winning it. Fred took the lead at once, tearing
through the thickets, tripping, stumbling.
"Easy, there!" called Horace. "We mustn't do ourselves up at the
start."
Fred slackened his pace somewhat, but continued to keep in front. For
nearly a mile from the river the land sloped gently upward through
dense thickets of birch. Then the birches thinned, and finally gave
way to evergreen, and the rising ground became rough with gravel and
rock. The slope changed to undulating billows of hills, covered with
stone of every size, from gravel to small boulders, and over it all
grew a stubbly jungle of cedar and jack-pine, seldom more than six feet
high.
It was a rough, broken country, and the boys had to slacken their pace
somewhat; to make things worse, it presently began to rain. First came
a driving drizzle, then a heavy downpour, with a strong southwest wind.
The rocks streamed with water, and the boys were drenched; but the
heavy rain presently settled again to a soaking drizzle that threatened
to continue all day.
Through the rain they struggled ahead; sometimes they found a clear
space where they could run; sometimes they came upon wet, tangled
shrubbery that impeded them sadly. They kept hoping for easier
traveling; but those broken, rocky hills stretched ahead for miles. At
last the trees became even more sparse, and the boys encountered a
whole hillside covered with a mass of split rock.
Over this litter of sandstone they crawled and stumbled at what seemed
a snail's pace. They were desperately anxious to hurry, but they knew
that a slip on those wet rocks might mean a broken leg.
A rain-washed slope of gravel came next; they went down it at a trot,
and then encountered another hillside covered with huge, loose stones.
They scrambled over it as best they could, and ran down another slope;
then trees became more abundant, and soon they were again traveling
over low, rolling hills clothed in jack-pine scrub.
With marvelous endurance Fred still held the lead. He went as if
driven by machinery, with his head down and his lips clenched; he did
not speak a word. He was supposed to be the weakest of the party, but
even Macgregor, a trained cross-country runner, found himself falling
farther and farther behind.
At eleven o'clock Horace called a halt. The rain had almost stopped,
and the boys, lighting a small fire, roasted generous slices of
venison. There was no need of sparing the meat now. Either plenty of
food or death was at the end of the journey.
No sooner had they eaten it than Fred sprang up again.
"How you fellows can sit here I can't understand!" he exclaimed,
nervously. "I'm going on. Are you coming?"
Mac and Horace followed him. The land seemed to be sloping continually
to lower levels; the woods thickened into a sturdy, tangled growth of
hemlock and tamarack that they had hard work to penetrate. They
presently caught a glimpse of water ahead, and came to the shore of a
small, narrow lake that curved away between rounded, dark hillsides.
They had to go round the lake, and lost two or three miles by the
détour. As they hurried up the shore a bull moose sprang from the
water, paused an instant to look back, and crashed into the thickets.
It would have been an easy shot if they had had the rifle.
Round the end of the lake low hills rose abruptly from the shore.
After scrambling up the slippery slope of the hills they reached the
top, and saw ahead of them an endless stretch of wild hills and
forests; there was not a landmark that they recognized.
Horace guessed that they had come about fifteen miles. Mac thought
that it was much more. They agreed that they had broken the back of
the journey, and that if their strength held out, they could reach the
Smoke that day.
"Suppose we were--to find the diamond-beds now!" said Mac, between
quick breaths.
"Don't talk to me about diamonds!" said Horace. "I never want to hear
the word again."
On they went, up and down the hills, through the thickets and over the
ridges; but they no longer went with the energy they had shown in the
morning. With every mile their pace grew slower, and they were all
beginning to limp. Fred still kept in front, with his face set in grim
determination. About the middle of the afternoon Horace came up with
him, stopped him with a hand on his shoulder, and looked into his face.
Fred's eyes were bright and feverish. His face was pale and spotted
with red blotches, and he breathed heavily through his open mouth.
"You've got to stop!" said his brother firmly. "You're going on your
nerves. A little farther, and you'll collapse--go down like a shot."
"I--I'm all right!" said Fred thickly. "Got to get on--got to make it
in time!"
But Horace was firm. First they built a smudge to keep off the flies;
then they made fresh repairs to their shoes; and finally they stretched
themselves flat to rest. But in spite of their fatigue, they were too
highly strung to stay quiet. They knew that a delay of an hour might
lose the race for them. After resting for less than half an hour, they
got up and went plunging through the woods again.
They believed now that the Smoke River could not be more than five or
six miles away. From every hilltop they hoped to catch sight of it, or
at least to see some spot that they had passed while prospecting.
But although all the landscape seemed strange, they doggedly continued
the struggle. The sun was sinking low over the western ridges now;
toiling desperately on, they left mile after mile behind, but still the
Smoke River did not come into sight. At last Macgregor sat down
abruptly upon a log.
"I'd just as soon die here as anywhere," he said.
"You're right. We'll stop, and go on by moonrise," said Horace.
"Grub's what we need now."
"Why, we're almost at the end! We can't stop now!" Fred cried.
"We won't lose anything," said his brother. "The trappers will be
camping, too, about this time. If we don't rest now we'll probably
never get to the Smoke at all."
Staggering with fatigue, he set about getting wood for a fire. Mac and
Fred helped him, and when they had built a fire they broiled some of
the deer meat. Fred could hardly touch the food. Horace and Macgregor
ate only a little, and almost as they ate they nodded, and dropped
asleep from sheer fatigue.
Fred knew that he, too, ought to sleep, but he could not even lie down.
His brain burned, his muscles twitched, and he felt strung like a taut
wire. Leaving his companions asleep, he started to scout ahead. He
went like one in a dream, hardly conscious of anything except the
overwhelming necessity of getting forward. His course took him over a
wooded ridge and down a hillside, and at last he came upon a tiny
creek. Stumbling, sometimes falling, but always pushing on, he
followed the course of the creek for a mile or two; suddenly he found
himself on the shore of a large and rapid river, into which the creek
emptied.
Furious at the obstacle, he looked for a place where he could cross the
river.
It was too deep for him to wade across it, and too swift for him to
swim it. He hurried up the bank, looking for a place where he could
ford it, and at last came to a stretch of short, violent rapids.
He was about to turn back when he caught sight of axe marks in the
undergrowth. Some one had cut a trail for the carry round the rapid.
He stared at the axe marks, and then at the river. Suddenly his dazed
brain cleared.
He recognized the spot. He recognized the trail that he himself had
helped to cut. He had found the Smoke River!