and the axe. These extras, with
the provisions and the cooking-utensils, made one light load and one
rather heavy one, and under this considerable handicap the day's march
was begun.

The slow progress was difficult from the very outset. Since the river
was their only guide, they did not dare to leave it to seek an easier
path. By noon Prime saw that his companion was keeping up by sheer force
of will, and he tried to get her to consent to a halt for the
afternoon. But she would not give up.

"No," she insisted. "We must go on. I am tired; I'll admit it; but I
should be something worse than tired if we should have to stop and be
overtaken."

From the beginning of the day's march they seemed to have left behind
all of the former hopeful signs, and were once more making their way
through a primeval forest, untouched, so far as they could see, by the
woodsman's axe. Their night camp was made among the solemn spruces by
the side of a little brook winding its way to the nearby river. Prime
made a couch of the spruce-tips, the folded tent cloth, and the
blankets, and persuaded Lucetta to lie down while he prepared the
supper.

When the meal was ready the substitute cook was the only one who could
eat. Lucetta said she didn't care for anything but a cup of tea, and
when Prime took it to her he saw that the slate-gray eyes were
unnaturally bright and her face was flushed. Whereat a great fear seized
upon him.

"You are sick!" he exclaimed, grappling helplessly with the unnerving
fear. "Why didn't you tell me before? I thought--I hoped you were just
tired out with the long tramp."

"I shall be better in the morning," she answered bravely. "It has been
coming on for a day or two, I think. Why did we camp here in this close
place, where it is so hot?"

Prime gripped his fleeting courage and held it hard. It was not hot
under the spruces; on the contrary, the evening was almost chilly.
Bestirring himself quickly to do what little he was able to do, he moved
the sick one gently and set up the tent to shelter her, dipped the
remaining bit of the soft deerskin into the brook and made a cold
compress for the aching head, and then sat down with a birch-bark fan to
keep the mosquitoes away.

As the night wore on he realized more and more his utter helplessness.
He had had no experience with sickness or with the care of the sick, and
if the remedies had been at hand he would not have known how to use
them. Time and again, afte