ods," replied Injin Charley sententiously, "I tell by
way you look at him pine."

Thorpe ruminated.

"Charley," said he, "why are you staying here with me?"

"Big frien'," replied the Indian promptly.

"Why are you my friend? What have I ever done for you?"

"You gottum chief's eye," replied his companion with simplicity.

Thorpe looked at the Indian again. There seemed to be only one course.

"Yes, I'm a lumberman," he confessed, "and I'm looking for pine. But,
Charley, the men up the river must not know what I'm after."

"They gettum pine," interjected the Indian like a flash.

"Exactly," replied Thorpe, surprised afresh at the other's perspicacity.

"Good!" ejaculated Injin Charley, and fell silent.

With this, the longest conversation the two had attempted in their
peculiar acquaintance, Thorpe was forced to be content. He was, however,
ill at ease over the incident. It added an element of uncertainty to an
already precarious position.

Three days later he was intensely thankful the conversation had taken
place.

After the noon meal he lay on his blanket under the hemlock shelter,
smoking and lazily watching Injin Charley busy at the side of the trail.
The Indian had terminated a long two days' search by toting from the
forest a number of strips of the outer bark of white birch, in its green
state pliable as cotton, thick as leather, and light as air. These
he had cut into arbitrary patterns known only to himself, and was now
sewing as a long shapeless sort of bag or sac to a slender beech-wood
oval. Later it was to become a birch-bark canoe, and the beech-wood oval
would be the gunwale.

So idly intent was Thorpe on this piece of construction that he did
not notice the approach of two men from the down-stream side. They were
short, alert men, plodding along with the knee-bent persistency of the
woods-walker, dressed in broad hats, flannel shirts, coarse trousers
tucked in high laced "cruisers "; and carrying each a bulging meal sack
looped by a cord across the shoulders and chest. Both were armed with
long slender scaler's rules. The first intimation Thorpe received of the
presence of these two men was the sound of their voices addressing Injin
Charley.

"Hullo Charley," said one of them, "what you doing here? Ain't seen you
since th' Sturgeon district."

"Mak' 'um canoe," replied Charley rather obviously.

"So I see. But what you expect to get in this Godforsaken country?"

"Beaver, muskrat,