from that, I shall be glad to know
what the trail is like under real conditions."

Stane argued further, but in vain, and in the end the girl had her way,
and took the trail with a pack of perhaps five and twenty pounds,
partly made up of the clothes she had changed into after her rescue.
Stane knew the woods; he guessed what havoc the trail would make of
skirts and for that reason he included the clothing in her pack,
foreseeing that there would be further need of them.

As they started the girl began to hum:

"Some talk of Alexander
And some of Hercules."

Stane laughed over his shoulder.

"I'm afraid a quick step will be out of keeping soon, Miss Yardely."

"Why?" she asked interrupting her song.

"Well--packing on trail is necessarily a slow business; and there's
rough country between these two rivers."

"You are trying to scare me because I'm a tenderfoot," she retorted
with a laugh that was like music in Stane's ears; "but I won't be
scared."

She resumed her song with a gay air of bravado; passing from one chanty
to another in a voice fluty as a blackbird. Stane smiled to himself. He
liked her spirit, and he knew that that would carry her through the
difficulties that lay before them, even when the flesh was inclined to
failure. But presently the springs of song dried up, and when the
silence had lasted a little time he looked round. The girl's face was
flushed, and the sweat was dropping in her eyes.

"Nothing the matter, I hope, Miss Yardely?"

"No, thank you," she answered with a little attempt to laugh; "but one
can't sing, you know, with mosquitoes and other winged beasts popping
into one's mouth."

"They are rather a nuisance," he agreed and plodded on.

Packing one's worldly possessions through the pathless wilderness is a
slow, grinding misery. The lightest pack soon becomes a burden. At the
beginning of a march it may seem a mere nothing, in an hour it is an
oppression; in three a millstone is a feather compared with it; and
before night the inexperienced packer feels that, like Atlas, he bears
the world upon his shoulders. It was therefore little wonder that Helen
Yardely ceased to sing after they had marched but a very little way;
and indeed the trail, apart from the apparently growing weight of the
pack, was not favourable to song. There was no sort of path whatever
after they had left the river bank; nothing but the primeval forest,
with an undergrowth that was so dense that