could
eat in a month."

"But they are not ours," she objected.

"No matter; we are going to eat them just the same."

"You mean that we can hire the owners to take us out of this wilderness?
Have you any money?"

"Plenty of it," he boasted, chinking the buckskin bag in his pocket, the
finding of which he had, up to this moment, entirely forgotten.

"But where are the owners? I don't see any camp."

"That is one reason why I didn't tell you last night. I found the canoe,
but I didn't find anything that looked--er--like a camp."

"Then we shall have to sit down patiently and wait until they come back.
They wouldn't go very far away and leave a loaded canoe alone like this,
would they?"

Prime gave a furtive side glance at the shadowy pool in the eddy. Truly
the canoe-owners had not gone very far, but it was quite far enough. If
he could have framed any reasonable excuse for it, he would have urged
the immediate borrowing of the canoe, and an equally immediate departure
from the spot of grisly associations. Indeed, he did go so far as to
suggest it, and was brought up standing, as he more than half expected
to be, against Miss Millington's conscience.

"Why, certainly we couldn't do anything like that!" she protested. "It
would be highway robbery! We must wait until they return. Surely they
won't be gone very long."

There was no help for it except in telling her the shocking truth, and
Prime was not equal to that. So he reconciled himself as best he could
to the enforced delay, hoping that the tender conscience would not
demand too much time.

Almost at once the owner of the conscience suggested that they make a
round through the adjoining forest in an attempt to discover the camp of
the missing men. Prime acceded cheerfully enough, though he was
impatient to examine the canoe-load, in which he was hoping there might
prove to be a supply of tobacco. For the better part of the forenoon
they quartered the forest around and about between the river and the
lake in widening circles, missing nothing but the glade of horrors,
which Prime took good care to avoid. At noon they came back to the
canoe-landing and made a frugal meal on the remains of their own store
of food.

"We are too punctiliously foolish," Prime declared when the second meal
without its tobacco aftermath had been endured. "You say we are obliged
to wait, and in that case we shall have to borrow, sooner or later. I
don't see any reason why we sho