to tell you--it seemed only the decent thing not to
tell you."

"When did you find them?"

"It was when I went over to the river on the excuse of trying to get
some berries while you were cooking supper. I had seen the canoe when I
went after the can of water. Instead of looking for berries I began to
hunt around for the owners, thinking that probably they were camped
somewhere near by. I didn't find any traces of a camp; but in the glade
there were the ashes of five fires arranged in the shape of a Greek
cross: one fire in the middle and one at the end of each arm. This
mystified me still more, but it was then growing so dark that it was no
use to look farther. Just as I was leaving the glade I stumbled over the
two men, locked in each other's arms; they had evidently been dead for
some hours, or maybe days."

"How perfectly frightful!" she exclaimed. "I don't wonder that you
looked ill when you came back."

"It nearly knocked me out," Prime confessed. "But I realized at once
that it wasn't necessary to multiply the shock by two. After you were
asleep that night I went over and buried the two men--weighted them
with stones and sunk them in the river, since I didn't have anything to
dig with. Afterward, while I was searching for the other knife, I found
a little buckskin bag filled with English sovereigns, lying, as I
supposed, where one of them had dropped it. It seemed to indicate the
motive for the desperate fight."

"But it adds just that much more to the mystery," was the young woman's
comment. "Were they white men?"

"Half-breeds or Indians, I couldn't tell which."

"Somebody hired them to do something with us?" she suggested
tentatively.

"That is only a guess. I have made it half a dozen times only to have it
pushed aside by the incredibilities. If we are to connect these two men
with our kidnapping, it presupposes an arrangement made far in advance.
That in itself is incredible."

"What do you make of the five fires?"

"I could make nothing of them unless they were intended for signal-fires
of some kind; but even in that case the arrangement in the form of a
cross wouldn't mean anything."

The young woman had finished her mending and was putting the fish-bone
needle carefully away against a time of future need.

"The arrangement might mean something if one were looking down upon it
from above," she put in quietly.

Prime got up to kick the burned log-ends into the heart of the fire.

"If I di