he cried.

"Might as well be fifteen hundred," said Captain Jack, "for all I can
get you there."

"Is there no house anywhere near?"

The skipper looked at him with gloomy scorn. "Say, do you think you're
in a rural neighbourhood?" he inquired.

"I asked you a question," Garth repeated. "Is there any one living near
here?"

Captain Jack shrugged. "Sometimes there's breeds at Bear Portage below,"
he said. "But not in the summer."

"Is there no road?"

"Not what _you'd_ call a road. How would you carry your outfit?"

This was a poser, Garth could not deny. "Where are the breeds in the
summer?" he demanded.

Captain Jack flung up his hands. "God knows!" he said. "Pitching
somewheres about between the East and the West!"

Garth set his jaw. "Well, there's some way of reaching the Warehouse,"
he said, "and I'm going to find it. You stop at Bear Portage, as you
call it, and I'll see what I can do."

"Sure!" said Captain Jack hopelessly. "As long as you like--But you'll
never make it!" he added with an atrabilious eye. "Never in God's world!
You better take my advice and get out of the country while you can!"

Garth turned on his heel, and Captain Jack revisited his stateroom for
consolation. Here, two shelves at the foot of his berth contained his
pharmaceutical stock in ancient, torn and fly-specked wrappers. He
bought every new variety of remedy he heard of with the ardour of a
collector. One of his most serious occupations was to lie in bed in
the morning, making up his mind what to begin the day on. Endless and
ingenious were the combinations he made.

They tied up at Bear Portage and had supper. Afterward, three breed boys
with their scent for happenings in the bush, as unerring and mysterious
as the buzzard's scent for carrion, turned up from nowhere, and at the
same time a fourth came nosing under the bank in a crazy dugout filled
with grass. So soft was the arrival of the last that Garth was not aware
of it, until he happened to catch sight of Mary Co-que-wasa deep in a
whispered consultation with the paddler. Finding Garth's eyes upon her,
Mary, with a hasty word to the boy, embarked, and the canoe's nose was
turned up-stream. As a possible means of transport later, Garth called
after the boy; but he only paddled the faster. The incident caused Garth
a vague uneasiness.

In the other three he found a means, such as it was, of extricating them
from their dilemma. He learned through St. Paul, who int