the last match. "We've two hours the start of
Breault, and there is no other canoe."

He began watching the shore closely, and it was not long before he made
out the white smoothness of a sandbar on their right. Here they landed
and for half an hour rested their cramped limbs.

Then they went on, and in his heart McKay blessed the deep swamp that
lay between them and Breault.

"I don't think he can make it without a canoe, even if he guesses we
went this way," he explained to Nada. "And that means--we are safe."

There was a cheery ring in his voice which would have changed to the
deadness of cold iron could he have looked back into that sluggish pit
of the Burntwood through which they had come, or could he have seen into
the heart of the still blacker swamp.

For through the swamp, feeling his way in the black abysses and amid the
monster-ghosts of darkness, came Peter.

And down the Burntwood, between the boggy mucklips of the swamp, a man
followed with slow but deadly surety, guiding with a long pole two light
cedar timbers which he had lashed together with wire, and which bore him
safely and in triumph where the canoe had gone before him.

This man was Breault, the man-hunter.

"The swamp will hold him!" McKay was saying again, exultantly. "Even if
he guesses our way, the swamp will hold him back, Nada."

"But he won't know the way we have come," cried Nada, the faith in
her voice answering his own. "Father John will guide him in another
direction."

Back in the pit-gloom, with a grim smile now and then relaxing the
tight-set compression of his thin lips, and with eyes that stared like a
night-owl's into the gloom ahead of him, Breault poled steadily on.

CHAPTER XXII

Dripping from the bog-holes and lathered with mud, it was the mystery of
Breault's noiseless presence somewhere near him in the still night that
drew Peter continually deeper into the swamp.

Half a dozen times he caught the scent of him in a quiet air that
seemed only now and then to rise up in his face softly, as if stirred by
butterflies' wings. Always it came from ahead, and Peter's mind worked
swiftly to the decision that where Breault was there also would be Nada
and Jolly Roger. Yet he caught the scent of neither of these two, and
that puzzled him.

Many times he found himself at the edge of the black lip of water, but
never quite at the right time to see a shadow in its darkness, or hear
the sound of Breault's pole.