a handful of tea, swung it by a poplar sapling over the
fire, and sat down to toast his bacon. In fifteen minutes his meal was
ready--such a meal as can be had only in the mountains under the open
sky and at the end of a ten-mile paddle against the stream of the Big
Horn. After dinner he lit his pipe and stretched himself in the warm
spring sun for half an hour's quiet think. The old restlessness was
coming back upon him. His work as Medical Superintendent of the railway
construction was practically completed. The medical department was
thoroughly organized and the fight with disease and dirt was pretty much
over so far as he was concerned. And with the easing of the strain there
came fiercely upon him the soul fever that had for the last three years
driven him from land to land. Had it not been that his professional
honour demanded that he should hold his post and do his work, he had
long ago left a district where he was kept constantly in mind of what
he had so resolutely striven to forget. By the exercise of the most
assiduous care he had prevented a meeting with his brother during the
last three months. But in this he could not hope to be successful much
longer. Before his second pipe was smoked he had reached his resolve.
"I'll pull out of this," he said, "once this Big Horn camp is cleaned
up."

He packed his kit, carefully extinguished his fire, the mark of a right
woodsman, slipped his canoe into the water, and set off again. His
meeting with Ben Fallows seemed somehow to have brought his brother
near him to-day. Everything was eloquent of those days they had spent
together on the upper reaches of the Ottawa. The flowing river, the open
sky, the wood, the fresh air, and, most of all, the slipping canoe spoke
to him of Dick. The fierce resentment, the bitter sense of loss, that
had been as a festering in his heart these years, seemed somehow to-day
to have lost their stinging pain. With every lift of the paddle, with
every deep breath of the fragrant spring air, with every slip of the
canoe, the buoyant gladness of those old canoeing days came swelling
into his heart, and ere he knew he caught himself singing, to the
rhythmic swing of paddle and shoulders, the old Habitant canoe song:

"En roulant ma boule roulant."

As often as he found his body swinging to the song, so often did he
sternly check himself and resolutely set another air going in his head,
only to find himself in a short space swinging a