e
can't claim this region by the right of discovery. Somebody has been
here before us."

"You didn't find a house?" she ventured.

"Oh, no; nothing like that. But I did find the stump of a tree, and the
tree had been felled with an axe. It wasn't recently; the stump was old
and moss-grown. But it was axe work just the same."

She laughed softly.

"I don't know whether to be glad or sorry, Donald; for myself, I mean.
Of course, you want to get back to your work."

"Do I?" he inquired. "I suppose I ought to want to. I left a book half
finished in my New York attic."

"How could you do that? I should think such work would be ruined by
having a vacation come along and cut it in two."

"I was sick of it," he confessed frankly. "It was another pen picture of
the artificialities, and I shall never finish it now. I'll write a
better one."

"Staging it in a Canadian forest?"

"Staging it among the realities, at least. And there shall be a real
woman this time."

In his new character of cousin-in-authority, Prime sent Lucetta early to
bed to catch up on her arrears of sleep. After she had disappeared
behind the curtains of the small shelter-tent, he sat for a long time
before the fire smoking the rank tobacco and letting his thoughts rove
at will through the mazes of the strange adventure which had befallen
him and this distant cousin, of whose very existence he had been
ignorant.

More and more the mazes perplexed him, and the coincidences, if they
were coincidences, began to verge upon the fantastic or the miraculous.
Was it by accident or design that they had both chanced to be in Quebec
at the same time? If the plot were of Grider's concocting, did the
barbarian know of the cousinship beforehand? Prime was charitable enough
to hope that he did. It made the brutal joke--if it were a joke--a
little less criminal to suppose that Grider knew of the relationship.

Still, it was all vastly incredible on any joking hypothesis. Taking
the most lenient view of it--that Grider had pre-arranged the assault
upon their liberty and had hired the two half-breeds to pick them up and
convoy them out of the wilderness--it was unbelievable that the
barbarous one, with all of his known disregard for the common humanities
where his Homeric sense of humor was involved, would have turned them
over to the tender mercies of two semi-savages whose character had been
sufficiently demonstrated by the manner of their death.

"It simply