und he had been led astray.

He climbed to the top of the rock, and placing his compass in a level
position, permitted the needle to swing to a stationary position. He
extracted a match from the tin box in his pocket and laid it upon the
compass dial exactly parallel with the needle. Lying on his face, he
squinted his eye along the match to a distant tree. Rising, he
observed the tree that he might make no mistake, and returning to the
face of the rock strode twenty of his best paces in the direction of
the tree. Again he was disappointed. There was no hackmatack tree at
the end of his line.

"Maybe he was a big man that does the pacin' and takes longer paces,"
he said to himself. "I'll go a bit farther."

He looked directly ahead, but saw no hackmatack within a reasonable
extension of his twenty paces to account for the longer strides the
original pacer may have taken. Much discouraged, he was about to
return again to the rock when suddenly his eye fell upon a small and
scarcely noticeable hackmatack six paces to the right of his north
line and a little beyond him.

"That must be he, now!" he exclaimed. "'Tis the only hackmatack I sees
hereabouts. 'Tis _sure_ he! I'll pace un back to the rock! If the
tree's nuth'ard from the rock, the rock'll be south'ard from the tree.
I'll try pacin' that way."

With his compass Jamie sighted from the tree to the rock, and to his
satisfaction the rock, lying due south, fell within his line of
sight, but at the extreme easterly end of its northerly face instead
of at the centre, the point from which he had run his original line.
He now paced the distance, which proved to be a little farther than
twenty of Jamie's longest strides, which he accounted for again by
reasoning that a man could take longer steps than he could stretch
with his short legs.

Then for the first time Jamie observed two stones, one on top of the
other, at the foot of the rock and at the very place to which his
compass had directed him. He lifted the stones and an examination
proved that they had not long since been placed in the position in
which he found them. Both had marks of earth upon them on the lower
side, but the stone which was below rested upon the carpet of caribou
moss which covered the ground and prevented it from coming in contact
with the earth. It could not, therefore, have been stained with soil
in the place where Jamie now found it.

"They was put there as a pilot mark! They shows the tr