man, who had any personal knowledge of the region. When a small
boy this Indian had once traversed with his father the now long
disused portage trail; and one day when Ungava Bob and Dick Blake met
him at the post he had, at their earnest solicitation, described to
them the country as he had seen it with the distorted vision of
extreme youth, and as his memory, alloyed with the superstitious tales
of nearly threescore years, recalled it.

It was, he said, a region of many lakes, over which flitted the
phantom canoes of those who had perished in the nearby dwelling place
of evil spirits. In the canoes were the ghostly forms of the victims,
for ever paddling their phantom crafts around the lakes, vainly
striving to escape the torment of mocking, ghoulish spirits which
pursued them. Surrounding the lakes were wild marshes and deep black
forests, which were peopled by innumerable evil spirits for ever
searching for new victims to destroy. Their thunder voices were always
to be heard, low and deep, in a terrible frenzy of unceasing anger,
ever hungry for men to devour.

In analysing this description Dick Blake eliminated the phantom canoes
as the wild creation of imagination, and the thunder voices of evil
spirits he set down as nothing more nor less than the roar of the
great falls of whose existence the Indians had told.

With this elimination he accepted as fact the statement that the
region was sprinkled with many lakes, and that without the assistance
of a canoe these lakes and perhaps some wide marshes would have to be
circumvented by him and his companions before they came upon the river
above the falls, where it was expected the Mingen Indians would be
encountered.

While Dick Blake was the first to declare that the Indians must be
punished for causing the supposed death of Bob and Shad, he was no
more thoroughly in earnest than were his companions.

Normally these trappers were quiet, peace-loving men, who would have
shuddered at the thought of causing human bloodshed; but now, moved
doubtless to a large extent by a natural desire to avenge an outrage
committed upon their friends, they also felt it their plain duty to
mete out punishment to the guilty ones, in order to insure themselves
and other white trappers against further molestation. Unless this were
done there was no guarantee against continued raids upon their tilts,
and there would always be the danger, and even probability, that
sooner or later they