ad shot the preceding day roasting on spits over the fire, and coffee
nearly ready. Rod also noticed that a part of the contents of the
canoe were missing.

"Took load up to river," explained Mukoki in response to the youth's
questioning.

"Working while we sleep, as usual," exclaimed the disgusted Wabigoon.
"If it keeps on we'll deserve another whipping, Rod!"

Mukoki examined a fat bluebill, roasted to a rich brown, and gave it
to Rod. Another he handed to Wabigoon, and with a third in his own
hands he found a seat for himself upon the ground close to the coffee
and bread.

"Ah, if this isn't fit for a king!" cried Rod, poising his savory
bluebill on the end of a fork.

Half an hour later the three went to their canoe. Mukoki had already
packed a half of its contents to the river, a quarter of a mile away,
and he now loaded himself with the remainder while the two boys
hoisted the light birch upon their shoulders. As Roderick caught his
first glimpse of the Ombabika in the growing light of day he gave a
cry of astonishment. When he had gone up the stream the preceding
winter it was scarce more than a dozen gun lengths in width. Now it
was a veritable Amazon, its black, ugly waters rolling and twisting
like the slow boiling of a thick liquid over a fire. There was little
rush about it, no frenzied haste, no mountain-like madness in the
advance of the torrent. Rod had expected to see this, and he would not
have been startled by it.

But there was something vastly more appalling in the flood that rolled
slowly before his eyes, with its lazily twisting whirlpools, its
thousand unseen currents, rolling the water here and there--always in
different places--like the gurgling eruptions he had often observed
in a pot of simmering oatmeal. There was something uncanny about
it, something terribly suggestive of giant hands under the surface,
waiting to pull them down. He knew, without questioning, that
there was more deadly power in that creeping flood than in a dozen
boisterous torrents thundering down from the mountains. In it were the
cumulative waters of a score of those torrents, and in its broad, deep
sweep into the big lake the currents and perils of each were combined
into one great threatening force.

The thoughts that were in Rod's mind betrayed themselves as he looked
at his companions. Mukoki was reloading the canoe. Wabi watched the
flood.

"She's running pretty strong," said the Indian youth dubiously. "W