the cheerful reply. "That is my part of
it, and yours will be a good bit harder; you will have to make some new
paddles and contrive some way to patch that big hole in the canoe."

Prime laughed hilariously. His head was still aching, but the disaster
had fallen so far short of the ultimate fatalities that the small
discomforts were as nothing.

"I can imagine both the paddles and the patch," he boasted. "It remains
to be seen whether or not I can turn them into serviceable realities."

While the dunnage was drying and Lucetta was regrinding her flour and
meal Indian-fashion on a smooth stone, Prime hacked manfully at a small
spruce and finally got it down. It took him the better part of the
afternoon to split the tree with wooden wedges and to get out two pieces
to be hewn roughly with the axe into the paddle shape. Over the evening
fire he whittled laboriously with the sharper of the two hunting-knives,
and when the knife grew dull he learned by patient trial to whet it on a
bit of stone. To keep him company, Lucetta had recourse to the fish-bone
needle. Her clothes had not come scathless out of the cataract disaster
and its aftermath.

"You have one of the best of the good qualities, Donald," she said,
marking the patience with which the whittling went on. "You are not
afraid to buckle down to the necessity and keep on trying."

"'Patient continuance in well-doing,'" he quoted, grinning. "I learned
that, up one side and down the other, in the writing trade. It is about
the only thing that gets you anywhere."

"You had a hard time making your start in the writing, didn't you?" she
offered.

"When did I ever tell you that?"

"You told me something about it the first day we were together, and a
good bit more last night."

"Huh! Talking in my sleep, was I? What did I say?"

"A lot of things; I can't remember them all. You talked about Mr.
Grider, and the mystery, and the dead men, and I don't know what all."

"I didn't say anything about the girl, did I?"

"Not a word," she returned.

"For the best possible reason on earth, Lucetta: there hasn't been any
girl. You don't believe that, I suppose. You wouldn't believe it of any
man of my age, and--and temperament?"

"Yet you said night before last that you wanted a wife and children and
a home. Doesn't that presuppose a girl?"

"In my case it presupposes a handsomely imaginary girl; I'm great on the
imaginary things."

"What does she look like--this ima