nd smoked them. In the day-time
he looked the country over as carefully as did Thorpe. But he ignored
the pines, and paid attention only to the hardwood and the beds of
little creeks. Injin Charley was in reality a trapper, and he intended
to get many fine skins in this promising district. He worked on his
tanning and his canoe-making late in the afternoon.

One evening just at sunset Thorpe was helping the Indian shape his
craft. The loose sac of birch-bark sewed to the long beech oval was
slung between two tripods. Injin Charley had fashioned a number of thin,
flexible cedar strips of certain arbitrary lengths and widths. Beginning
with the smallest of these, Thorpe and his companion were catching one
end under the beech oval, bending the strip bow-shape inside the sac,
and catching again the other side of the oval. Thus the spring of the
bent cedar, pressing against the inside of the birch-bark sac, distended
it tightly. The cut of the sac and the length of the cedar strips gave
to the canoe its graceful shape.

The two men bent there at their task, the dull glow of evening falling
upon them. Behind them the knoll stood out in picturesque relief against
the darker pine, the little shelters, the fire-places of green spruce,
the blankets, the guns, a deer's carcass suspended by the feet from a
cross pole, the drying buckskin on either side. The river rushed by with
a never-ending roar and turmoil. Through its shouting one perceived, as
through a mist, the still lofty peace of evening.

A young fellow, hardly more than a boy, exclaimed with keen delight of
the picturesque as his canoe shot around the bend into sight of it.

The canoe was large and powerful, but well filled. An Indian knelt in
the stern; amidships was well laden with duffle of all descriptions;
then the young fellow sat in the bow. He was a bright-faced, eager-eyed,
curly-haired young fellow, all enthusiasm and fire. His figure was trim
and clean, but rather slender; and his movements were quick but nervous.
When he stepped carefully out on the flat rock to which his guide
brought the canoe with a swirl of the paddle, one initiated would have
seen that his clothes, while strong and serviceable, had been bought
from a sporting catalogue. There was a trimness, a neatness, about them.

"This is a good place," he said to the guide, "we'll camp here." Then he
turned up the steep bank without looking back.

"Hullo!" he called in a cheerful, unembarrassed