urther than to form surging masses of frazil ice
that would neither let a canoe push through them, nor yet support the
weight of a man. Winter or summer, it was no thoroughfare--and neither
was the ungodly jumble of swamp and mountains that stopped me from
tapping the lower end of it--or I should not have spent the last three
months in making fifty miles of road through untrodden bush to Caraquet,
over which to transport the La Chance gold to a post-road and a railway:
and it was no chosen return route of mine to La Chance now, either.

If I could draw you a map I should not have to explain the country. But
failing that I will be as clear as I can.

The line of Lac Tremblant, and that of the road I had just made from
Caraquet to La Chance, ran away from each other in two sides of a
triangle,--except that the La Chance mine was five miles down the far
side of the lake from Caraquet, and my road had to half-moon round the
head of Lac Tremblant to get home--a lavish curve, too, by reason of
swamps.

But it was on that half-moon road that I should have been now, if my
order to have a horse meet me at the Halfway stables I had built at the
beginning of it had not been forgotten or disregarded by some one at La
Chance.

Getting drenched to the skin with lake water was no rattling good
exchange for riding home on a fresh horse that felt like a warm stove
under me, but a five-mile short cut across the apex of the road and lake
triangle was better than walking twenty-two miles along the side of it
on my own legs--which was the only choice I had had in the matter.

I was obliged to get home, for reasons of my own; but when I walked in
on Billy Jones, the foreman at the Halfway stables, that afternoon,
after months of absence and road-making, there was not even a team horse
in his stables, let alone my own saddle mare. There was not a soul about
the place, either, but Billy himself, blandly idle and sprawling over a
grubby old newspaper in front of the stove in his shack.

His welcome was heartening, but his intelligence was not. No one had
told him a word about me or my mare, he informed me profanely; also that
it was quite impossible for me to ride over to La Chance that night.
There were not any work horses at the Halfway, because he had doubled up
the teams for some heavy hauling from Caraquet, according to my orders
sent over from Caraquet the week before, and no horses had been sent
back from La Chance since. He guesse