_MARCHONS!_

PRIME leaned against a tree and took a full minute for a grasping of the
new situation.

"I more than half believe you are right," he admitted at length. Then,
with a crabbed laugh: "If there is any bigger dunce on earth than I am I
should like to meet him--just as a matter of curiosity. I'll never brag
on my imagination after this. I could see plainly enough that the fellow
was fairly eaten up with suspicion, and it would have been so easy to
have invented a plausible lie to satisfy him."

"Don't be sorry for that," the young woman put in quickly. "If they
arrest us we shall have to tell the truth."

Prime was frowning thoughtfully. "That is where the shoe pinches. Do you
realize that the story we have to tell is one that no sane magistrate or
jury could ever believe, Lucetta? These two men, Beaujeau and Cambon,
must have started from some known somewhere, alive and well. They
disappear, and after a while we turn up in possession of their
belongings and try to account for ourselves by telling a fantastic
fairy-tale. It's simply hopeless!"

"You are killing the only suggestion I had in mind," was the dispirited
rejoinder. "I was going to say that we might wait here until they came
for us, but that won't do at all. We must hurry and disappear before
they come back and find us!"

"I think it will be best," Prime decided promptly. "If we had a
reasonable story to tell it would be different. But we haven't, and the
chances are that we should get into all sorts of trouble trying to
explain for other people a thing that we can't explain for ourselves. It
is up to us to hit the trail. Are you fit for it?"

"Why shouldn't I be?" she asked, but there was no longer the old-time
buoyancy in her tone.

"I have had a notion the last day or two that you were not feeling quite
up to the mark," Prime explained soberly. "It is something about your
eyes; they look heavy, as if you hadn't had sleep enough."

"I can do my part of anything that we have to do," she returned, rising;
and together they made a judicious division of the dunnage, deciding
what they could take and what they must leave behind.

The uncertainties made the decision hard to arrive at. If the tramp
should last no more than three or four days they could carry the
necessary food without much difficulty. But they could scarcely afford
to give up the blankets and the shelter-tent, and Prime insisted that
they must take at least one of the guns