t
food--especially hot tea--was what they longed for; but they were
afraid to make a fire, and they had to content themselves with a little
raw venison for their breakfast.

Horace thought that they could make their ambush where they were as
well as anywhere else. The portage was about thirty yards long, and
the narrow trail passed over a ridge and ran through dense hemlock
thickets. If the trappers came up the trail in single file, carrying
heavy loads, they could not use their rifles against a sudden attack.

The boys armed themselves each with a hardwood bludgeon; then they
ensconced themselves in the thickets where they could see the reaches
of the river below--and waited.

An hour passed. It was almost sunrise, and there was no sign of the
trappers on the river. The boys grew nervous with dread and anxiety.
The tree-tops began to glitter with sunlight. It was almost six
o'clock.

"Could they have gone some other way?" asked Fred uneasily, staring
upstream.

At that very moment Macgregor grasped his arm and pointed down the
river. Two small objects had appeared round a bend, half a mile below.
They were certainly canoes, making slow headway against the stiff
current, but they were too far away for the boys to make them out
plainly. Minute by minute they grew nearer.

"The front one's a Peterboro!" said Mac. "There's one man in it, and
two in the other. I think I can see the fox cage."

Without doubt it was the trappers. The young prospectors slipped back
through the thickets, almost to the upper end of the trail, and
concealed themselves in the hemlocks.

"Above all things, try to get hold of their guns!" said Horace.

For a long while they waited in terrible suspense. They could not see
the landing, nor at first could they hear anything, for the tumbling
water of the rapids roared in their ears. After what seemed almost an
hour, stumbling footsteps sounded near by on the trail, and the bow of
the Peterboro hove in sight. A man was carrying it on his head; he
steadied it with one hand, and in the other grasped a gun--Horace's
repeating rifle.

When he was almost within arm's reach, Mac sprang and tackled him low
like a football player. The trapper dropped the gun with a startled
yell, and went over headlong into the hemlocks--canoe and all.

Horace leaped out to seize the gun that the man had dropped. Before he
could touch it, the second trapper rushed up the trail with his rifle
clubbe