d affably that some one might be
driving over from the mine in the morning, and that after tramping from
Caraquet I had better stay where I was for the night.

I hesitated. I was dog-tired for once in my life, but I had not done any
tramp from Caraquet that day, if I had told the bald truth. Only I had
no idea of telling it, nor any wish to explain to Billy Jones that I had
been making a fool of myself elsewhere, doing a solid week of hospital
nursing over a filthy boy I had found on my just-finished road the
morning I had really left Caraquet. From the look of him I guessed he
had got hurt cutting down a tree and not getting out of the way in time,
though he was past telling me that or anything else. But I had also
guessed where he lived, by the dirt on him, and was ass enough to carry
him home to the squalid, half-French, half-Indian village the Caraquet
people called Skunk's Misery.

It lay in the bush, in a slanting line between Caraquet and Lac
Tremblant: a nest of thriftless evil stuck in a hollow you might pass
within twenty yards of, and never guess held a house. Once there I had
no choice but to stay and nurse the boy's sickening pain, till his
mother came home from some place where she was fishing eels for the
winter; for none of the rest of the population of fat-faced,
indifferent women--I never saw a man, whether they were away in the
lumber woods or not--would lay a hand on him. I will say plainly that I
was more than thankful to hand him over to his mother. I had spilt over
myself a bottle of some nameless and abominable brew that I'd mistaken
for liniment, and my clothes smelt like carrion; also the lean-to I had
lived in was so dirty that I scratched from suspicion all day long,
except when I was yawning from a week of hardly closing my eyes.
Altogether, as I said, I was dog-tired, if it were not from walking, and
I might have stayed at Billy Jones's if I had not been crazy to get rid
of my dirt-infected clothes. The worst reek had gone from them, but even
out in the open air they smelt. I saw Billy Jones wrinkle up his nose to
sniff innocently while he talked to me, and that settled me.

"I have to get home," I observed hastily. "Wilbraham expected me a week
ago. But I don't walk any twenty-two miles! I'll take your old canoe and
a short cut across the lake."

I was the only man who ever used Lac Tremblant, and the foreman of the
Halfway stables cast a glance on me. "If it was me, I'd walk," he
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