conditions were strictly compelling. The chance to secure the ownerless
and well-stocked canoe was by no means to be lost, but Prime saw
difficulties ahead. His companion would wish to know a lot of things
that she must not be told, and he was well assured that she would have
to be convinced of their right to take the canoe before she would
consent to be an accomplice in the taking. This meant delay, which in
its turn rigidly imposed the complete effacement of all traces of the
tragedy. He was waiting to begin the effacement.

By the time his tobacco was gone he was quivering with a nervous
impatience to be up and at it and have it over with. After the crackling
fire died down the forest silence was unbroken. The young woman was
asleep; he could hear her regular breathing. But the time was not yet
ripe. The moon had risen, but it was not yet high enough to pour its
rays into the tree-sheltered glade, and without its light to aid him the
horrible thing he had to do would be still more horrible.

It was nearly midnight when he got up from his place beside the
whitening embers of the camp-fire and pulled himself together for the
grewsome task. Half-way to the glade a fit of trembling seized him and
he had to sit down until it passed. It was immensely humiliating, and he
lamented the carefully civilized pre-existence which had left him so
helplessly unable to cope with the primitive and the unusual.

When he reached the glade and the big spruce the moon was shining full
upon the two dead men. One of them had a crooking arm locked around the
neck of the other. Prime's gorge rose when he found that he had to
strain and tug to break the arm-grip, and he had a creeping shock of
horror when he discovered that the gripped throat had a gaping wound
through which the man's life had fled. In the body of the other man he
found a retaliatory knife, buried to the haft, and it took all his
strength to withdraw it.

With these unnerving preliminaries fairly over, he went on doggedly,
dragging the bodies one at a time to the river-brink. Selecting the
quietest of the eddies, and making sure of its sufficient depth by
sounding with a broken tree limb, he began a search for
weighting-stones. There were none on the river-bank, and he had to go
back to the lake shore for them, carrying them an armful at a time.

The weighting process kept even pace with the other ghastly details.
The men both wore the belted coats of the northern guides,