splay of courage than hers when
Clarence cabled the news."

He broke off, as if he felt that he had been talking with too much
freedom, and just then the report of a rifle came ringing across the
water.

"That's a duck's head shot off. Jake doesn't miss," he said.

Lisle nodded. He could take a hint; and he had no doubt that Nasmyth was
right regarding the shot, though it is not easy to decapitate a swimming
duck with a rifle. He began to talk about the portage; and soon after
Jake returned with a single duck they went to sleep.

It was clear and bright the next morning and they spent the day carrying
their loads a few miles up the hollow which pierced the height of the
divide. Part of it was a morass, fissured with little creeks running down
from the hills whose tops rose at no great elevation above the opening.
This was bad to traverse, but it was worse when they came to a muskeg
where dwarf forest had once covered what was now a swamp. Most of the
trees had fallen as the soil, from some change in the lake's level, had
grown too wet. They had partly rotted in the slough, and willows had
afterward grown up among them.

Now and then the men laid down their loads and hewed a few of the still
standing trunks, letting them fall to serve as rude bridges where the
morass was almost impassable, but the real struggle began when they went
back for the canoe. At first they managed to carry her on their shoulders,
wading in the bog, but afterward she must be dragged through or over
innumerable tangles of small fallen trunks and networks of rotten branches
that had to be laboriously smashed. It was heroic labor--sometimes they
spent an hour making sixty yards--and Lisle's face grew anxious as well as
determined. Game had been very scarce; the deer would not last them long;
and disastrous results might follow a continuance of their present slow
progress. When, utterly worn out, they made camp on slightly firmer ground
toward four o'clock in the afternoon, Lisle strode off heavily toward the
bordering hills, while Jake pushed on to prospect ahead. Nasmyth, who was
quite unable to accompany either, prepared the supper and awaited their
reports with some anxiety.

Lisle came back first and shook his head when Nasmyth asked if he had
found a better route on higher ground.

"Not a slope we could haul along," he reported. "That way's impracticable."

It was nearly dark when Jake came in.

"It's not too bad ahead," he informed t