dy emitting clouds of smoke. But the professor
caught the ball flying.

"I thought you said he sank without a cry," he remarked quietly, looking
straight up into the frightened face opposite, and then riddling
mercilessly the confused explanation that followed.

The cumulative effect of all these forces, hitherto so rigorously
repressed, now made itself felt, and the circle spontaneously broke up,
everybody moving at once by a common instinct. The professor's wife left
the party abruptly, with excuses about an early start next morning. She
first shook hands with Rushton, mumbling something about his comfort in
the night.

The question of his comfort, however, devolved by force of circumstances
upon myself, and he shared my tent. Just before wrapping up in my double
blankets--for the night was bitterly cold--he turned and began to
explain that he had a habit of talking in his sleep and hoped I would
wake him if he disturbed me by doing so.

Well, he did talk in his sleep--and it disturbed me very much indeed.
The anger and violence of his words remain with me to this day, and it
was clear in a minute that he was living over again some portion of the
scene upon the lake. I listened, horror-struck, for a moment or two, and
then understood that I was face to face with one of two alternatives: I
must continue an unwilling eavesdropper, or I must waken him. The former
was impossible for me, yet I shrank from the latter with the greatest
repugnance; and in my dilemma I saw the only way out of the difficulty
and at once accepted it.

Cold though it was, I crawled stealthily out of my warm sleeping-bag and
left the tent, intending to keep the old fire alight under the stars and
spend the remaining hours till daylight in the open.

As soon as I was out I noticed at once another figure moving silently
along the shore. It was Hank Milligan, and it was plain enough what he
was doing: he was examining the holes that had been cut in the upper
ribs of the canoe. He looked half ashamed when I came up with him, and
mumbled something about not being able to sleep for the cold. But,
there, standing together beside the over-turned canoe, we both saw that
the holes were far too small for a man's hand and arm and could not
possibly have been cut by two men hanging on for their lives in deep
water. Those holes had been made afterwards.

Hank said nothing to me and I said nothing to Hank, and presently he
moved off to collect logs for t