That's what it was. How in the name of all that is
wonderful did you know?"

"I was merely putting one and one together to make two," was the quiet
rejoinder. "The young woman I was with that same night was Mrs. Bandish.
She was the one whose careless sleeve-pin scratched my arm and put me to
sleep."

"Then you knew them both?" Prime demanded.

"Only slightly. They claimed to be teachers from some little town in
Indiana. I don't know where they joined our party, but I think it was
before we took the St. Lawrence River boat. Anyway, it was somewhere in
Canada. They were easy to get acquainted with. At first I didn't like
the young woman any too well; there was something about her that gave me
the idea that she was--well, that she was somehow too sophisticated. But
that wore off. She was quick-witted and jolly, and both she and her
husband were the life of the party coming down the big river."

"Do you suppose Grider bribed them to join the party and thus get you in
tow?" Prime asked.

"No, I don't suppose anything of the kind. You are forgetting that Mr.
Grider didn't even know of my existence at that time--if he does now,"
she added, after a moment's hesitation.

"Grider knew, and he knew that we were cousins," Prime insisted. "That
is a guess, but you will see that it will turn out to be the right one.
But even that doesn't explain why he should come up here in the woods
and cut a hole in our canoe, confound him!"

"It doesn't explain a good many things which are much more mysterious
than they were before," said Lucetta; and shortly after that she smoked
her tent blue with a bit of smudge wood and disappeared for the night,
leaving Prime to pull reflectively at a clumsy pipe which he had
contrived to whittle out of a bit of birch wood during the day of
waiting, to smoke and to hope that the threatening rain-storm would
materialize and drown a few millions of the tormenting mosquitoes.

XV

JEAN BA'TISTE

ON a morning which Prime, consulting his notched stick, named as the
twenty-fourth of July, they gave the canoe patches another daubing of
pitch for good luck, relaunched their argosy, loaded the dunnage, and
began to learn the art of paddling anew--the relearning being made
strictly necessary by the new green-wood paddles.

From a boisterous mill-race in its upper reaches, their river had now
subsided into a broad stream with a curren