hing I don't fancy is the way the
river has changed its course. Have you noticed that for the last three
days it has been flowing mainly northward?"

The young woman became interested at once. "I hadn't noticed it," she
admitted, and then: "Why don't you like it?"

"Because it seems a bit ominous. It may mean that we were carted clear
over to the northern side of the big watershed, though that doesn't seem
possible. If we were, we are going painstakingly away from civilization
instead of toward it. That would account at once for the fact that we
haven't come across any timber-cuttings. The northern rivers all flow
into Hudson Bay."

Lucetta's gaze became abstracted. "Besides that, we are still groping in
the blind alleys of the mysteries," she put in. "Have you given up the
Mr. Grider idea?"

"I can't give it up wholly and save my sanity," Prime averred. "Think a
minute; if we throw that away, what have we to fall back upon? Nothing,
absolutely nothing! Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does the sane mind.
Don't mistake me; I haven't the slightest idea that Grider let us in for
any such experience as this, meaning to. But he took a chance, as every
practical joker does, and the result in our case has spelled disaster.
I am only hoping that it has spelled disaster for him, too, confound
him!"

She smiled sweetly.

"Are you calling it disaster now? Only yesterday you said you were
enjoying it. Have you changed your mind?"

"I have, and I haven't. From a purely selfish point of view, I'm having
the finest kind of a vacation, and enjoying every blessed minute of it.
More than that, the raggeder I grow the better I feel. It's perfectly
barbarous, I know; but it is the truth. My compunctions are all
vicarious. I shouldn't have had half so much fun if I had gone motoring
through New England."

The young woman smiled again. "You needn't waste any of the vicarious
compunctions on me. Honestly, Donald, I--I'm having the time of my life.
It is the call of the wild, I suppose. I shall go back home, if I ever
reach home, a perfect savage, no doubt, but the life of the humdrum will
never be able to lay hold of me again, in the sense that it will possess
me, as it used to."

Prime's grin was an expression of the purely primitive.

"It is a reversion to type," he asserted, getting up to arrange
Lucetta's sleeping-tent. "It makes one wonder if all humanity isn't
built that way; if it wouldn't go back at a gallop if it were giv