th the thin sheathing of the canoe had been cut as
if with the slashing blow of a sharp knife.

Prime was the first to find speech, and what he said would have kindled
a fire under wet wood. Then he remembered and made gritting amends. "I
beg your pardon; I couldn't help it, Lucetta. I'm not taken that way
very often, but I should have blown up like a rotten boiler if I
couldn't have relieved the pressure. Did you ever hear of such an
infernally idiotic scoundrel in all your life? I wish to gracious I'd
had the courage of my convictions and turned loose on him with the gun!
He deserves to be shot!"

Lucetta was examining the damaged canoe bottom more closely. "But why?"
she protested. "Why should he follow us up so vindictively, Donald?
Surely it has passed all the limits of any kind of a joke by this time."

"Of a joke?--yes; I should say so! I hate to think it of him, Lucetta--I
do for a fact. If I hadn't seen him I wouldn't believe it was Watson;
but seeing is believing."

"Not always," was the reflective dissent. And then: "This is the work of
a spiteful enemy, Donald; not that of any friend, however harebrained.
It is the work of some one who has a particular object in keeping us
from getting back to civilization."

"We have been over all that ground until it is worn out," Prime broke in
impatiently. "It is Grider; it can't be anybody else; and I wish I had
potted him while I had the chance. But that is a back number now. The
mischief is done and we must repair it if we can. Get your glue-pot
ready and I'll go and hunt for some more of the sticky stuff."

Lucetta was laughing silently.

"We are so humanly inconsistent--both of us!" she commented. "Yesterday
we were almost willing to be sorry because our woods idyll couldn't last
forever; and now we are ready to draw and quarter Mr. Grider--or whoever
did this--because it makes the idyll last a few days longer."

It took them the better part of the day to patch the knife-gash, and,
though the other patch seemed to be holding satisfactorily, they were
doubtful of the results in the more serious hurt. It was impossible to
devise any clamp for the greater rent, but they did their best,
overlaying the fresh patches with clean sheets of the bark and weighting
the whole down with flat stones carried laboriously from the river
brink.

That night Prime slept with one eye open and with both guns where he
could lay his hands upon them quickly. Somewhile past midnigh