54
XXIV. Millicent Summons Her Guide 265
XXV. A Reliable Man 276
XXVI. Lisle Turns Autocrat 287
XXVII. An Unpleasant Surprise 298
XXVIII. Clarence Reaches Camp 309
XXIX. A Bold Scheme 321
XXX. The End of the Pursuit 332
XXXI. Lisle Goes To England 343

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THE LONG PORTAGE

CHAPTER I

THE GLADWYNE EXPEDITION

Vernon Lisle was fishing with a determination that did not spring
altogether from love of the sport. The water of the British Columbian
river in which he stood knee-deep was icy cold; his rubber boots were
badly ripped and leaky, and he was wet with the drizzle that drove down
the lonely valley. It was difficult to reach the slack behind a boulder
some distance outshore, and the arm he strained at every cast ached from
hours of assiduous labor; but there was another ache in his left side
which was the result of insufficient food, and though the fish were shy
he persevered.

A few hundred yards away the stream came roaring down a long declivity in
a mad white rapid and then shot across the glassy green surface of the
pool below in a raised-up wedge of foam. Wet boulders and outcropping
fangs of rock hemmed in the water, and among them lay stranded logs and
stream-packed masses of whitened branches. Farther back, ragged cypresses
and cedars, half obscured by the drifting haze of spray, climbed the
sides of the gorge, and beyond rose the dim, rounded summits of treeless
hills. There were streaks of snow on some of them, for winter threatened
to close in unusually early.

With a lowering sky overhead and the daylight beginning to fade, it was a
desolate picture; one into which the lonely figure of the man in tattered
deerskin jacket and shapeless hat somehow fitted. His attire matched the
gray-white coloring of rock and boulder; his spare form and agile
movements, together with the intentness of his bronzed face and the
steadiness of his eyes, hinted at the quickness of observation, the
stubborn endurance, and the tireless activity, by which alone life can be
maintained in the savage North. He had the alertness of the wild
creatures of the waste; and it was needed.

All round him stretched a forbidding wilderness, part of the great
desolation which runs north from the warmer and more hospitable
thick-forest belt of British Columbia. In