its touch,
and she fell asleep.

When she awoke the sun had risen and Prime was up and mending the fire.

"Better," he said cheerfully, in answer to her instant question. "Much
better; though my head reminds me of the day when I got the check for my
first story--pretty badly swelled, you know. But after I've had a good
cup of hot tea"--he stopped in mid-career with a wry laugh. "Bless my
fool heart! If I hadn't totally forgotten that we haven't any tea or
anything else! And here I've been up a quarter of an hour and more,
trying to get a good cooking-fire started! Where were we when we left
off last night?"

"We had set out to search for the wreck of the canoe," she explained,
rising to stand before the fire. "We came this far, and concluded it
was no use trying to go on in the dark. You were pretty badly off, too."

"It's coming back to me, a little at a time and often, as the cat
remarked when it ate the grindstone," he went on, determined to make her
smile if it were within the bounds of possibility. He knew she must have
had a bad night of it, and the brightness of the gray eyes told him that
even now she was not very far from tears. "Don't cry," he added
abruptly; "it's all over now."

Her laugh was the sort that harbors next door to pathos.

"I'm hungry!" she said plaintively. "We had no dinner yesterday, and no
supper last night, and there doesn't seem to be any very brilliant
prospect for breakfast this morning."

Prime put his hand to his bruised head as if to satisfy himself that it
was all there.

"Haven't you ever gone without a meal before for the raw reason that you
couldn't get it?" he asked.

"Not since I can remember."

"I have; and it's bad medicine--mighty bad medicine. We'll put the fire
out and move on. While there's life there's hope; and our hope this
morning is that we are going to find the wreck of that canoe. Let's
hike."

They set out courageously, keeping close to the bank of the river and
scanning every eddy and backwater as they moved along. For this cause
their progress was slow, and it was nearly or quite noon when they came
to a quiet reach in the river, a placid pond with great trees
overhanging its margins and wide stretches of reeds and bulrushes
growing in the shallows. And on the opposite side of the pond-like
expanse and apparently grounded among the bulrushes they saw their
canoe. It was bottom side up with care, and on the wrong side of the
river; also they knew th