ything between southeast
and southwest; and if we take the spot where you found your partner
afterward, and make a sweep with a forty-mile radius, which is what
we've concluded was the distance he probably covered, it gives us
quite a big tract of country to search. Still, we ought to find a lake
that's a mile or two across."

Weston laughed softly.

"It's my third attempt, and I don't know how often Grenfell has tried.
One could almost fancy that the lake has vanished. That sounds a
little absurd, doesn't it?"

"Well," said Devine, with an air of reflection, "we won't admit that
it's an impossibility. If you can take that for granted, it simplifies
the thing."

Grenfell, who lay with his back against a fir trunk, roused himself
suddenly.

"I never thought of it in that way," he said. "Still, lakes as big as
that one don't vanish."

"Anyway, mines seem to do so. The woods are full of them, if all one
hears is true."

"It isn't," said Weston dryly, "though I've no doubt there are a few
lost mines. Are you sure you haven't done a crazy thing in joining us
in the hunt for this one? Of course, I've tried to put that aspect of
the matter squarely before you already."

Devine, who was a young man, flushed slightly.

"The cold fact is that I was only afraid you wouldn't take me. It's a
big inducement to know that one has a reasonable supply of provisions
in hand."

"You've evidently been up against it, like the rest of us," Grenfell
suggested.

"I've lived for three months on the proceeds of the only job I got;
and it's quite likely I shouldn't have held out if I hadn't been
broken into the thing while I got through with my studies in Toronto.
I don't quite know now how I did that, but I had to hire out between
whiles, teaming and dredging up building stone from the lake, to make
my fees, and now and then I lived on one meal a day to spin out the
money. It would have been easier at the settlement, but I had a lesson
soon after I put up my sign. Two city men sent up by a syndicate to
look for a pulp-mill site and timber rights came along one hot day and
found me splitting cedar shingles, with mighty few clothes on. The
result was that while I might have made a small pile of money out of
them, they sent back to Vancouver for another man and paid him twice
as much, though they didn't locate the mill. I felt I had to tell you
this."

It was not at all an uncommon story in that country, and when Weston
looked at