uck the boggy shore, and
occasionally Nada would hold lighted matches while he extricated the
canoe from tree-tops and driftwood that impeded the way. He loved the
brief glimpses he caught of her face in the match-glow, and twice he
deliberately wasted the tiny flares that he might hold the vision of
her a little longer.

At last he began to feel the pulse of a current against his paddle, and
soon after that the star-mist began filtering through the thinning
tree-tops again, so that he knew they were almost through the swamp.
Another half-hour and they were free of it, with a clear sky overhead
and the cheering song of running water on both sides of them.

Nada sat up, and it was now so light that he could see the soft shimmer
of her hair in the starlight. He also saw a pretty little grimace in
her face, even as she smiled at him.

"I--I can't move," she exclaimed. "_Ugh_! my feet are asleep--"

"We'll go ashore and stretch ourselves," said McKay, who had looked at
his watch in the light of the last match. "We've two hours the start of
Breault, and there is no other canoe."

He began watching the shore closely, and it was not long before he made
out the white smoothness of a sandbar on their right. Here they landed
and for half an hour rested their cramped limbs.

Then they went on, and in his heart McKay blessed the deep swamp that
lay between them and Breault.

"I don't think he can make it without a canoe, even if he guesses we
went this way," he explained to Nada. "And that means--we are safe."

There was a cheery ring in his voice which would have changed to the
deadness of cold iron could he have looked back into that sluggish pit
of the Burntwood through which they had come, or could he have seen
into the heart of the still blacker swamp.

For through the swamp, feeling his way in the black abysses and amid
the monster-ghosts of darkness, came Peter.

And down the Burntwood, between the boggy mucklips of the swamp, a man
followed with slow but deadly surety, guiding with a long pole two
light cedar timbers which he had lashed together with wire, and which
bore him safely and in triumph where the canoe had gone before him.

This man was Breault, the man-hunter.

"The swamp will hold him!" McKay was saying again, exultantly. "Even if
he guesses our way, the swamp will hold him back, Nada."

"But he won't know the way we have come," cried Nada, the faith in her
voice answering his own. "Father John wi