moved: then, as they started for him, he
darted like a flash for deep water, pursued by the two men at the top of
their speed through a sheet of water six inches deep for nearly a
hundred feet out. It was a fair race, and the six-feet-three Indian made
a splendid spurt, but the pike won.

[Illustration: THE MISSISSIPPI AT LAST!]

The stream bore us upward to the floating bog out of which it flowed. We
drew the canoes out upon a meadow which undulated in graceful billows at
our every movement. A step would shake all the surface for a rod about
us, while our combined tread sent waves of grassy earth in every
direction. A sudden leap so shook the cup of cold coffee sitting by one
of the Indians, six or seven yards away, that the liquid spilled over
the cup's edge. The whole meadow, solid to the eye, is but one of those
monster sponges that hold in abeyance waters which otherwise would sweep
like a flood down the great rivers. Beyond this billowy field we came to
the open water of another unnamed lake, about one mile long, fringed
about with green pines, to which we gave the name of Longworth, in honor
of Cincinnati's distinguished judge, and to a lovely little green island
thickly grown with trees we gave the name of another canoeist left
behind, Mr. Empson of Louisville. At the head of Longworth Lake, and in
plain view of Empson Island, within a space cleared out of a dense
jungle, we made our last camp before reaching the coveted Mississippi.
Our stay here was marked in red by the most vindictive attack from
mosquitos in all the cruise. No one unacquainted with the Northern
Minnesota wilderness in midsummer, or with a region having a similar
insect population, can at all imagine the number and fierceness of the
ravenous aerial hosts that had beset us all the way from White Earth. In
mid-day they keep one constantly alert, while at night they are beyond
credible report. They are small, shrewd and persistent. As I lay awake
their myriad voices about and above me made a great chorus, really grand
and impressive, out of which for a few seconds at a time there came
bursts of harmony which I could hardly separate from the idea of a
vast, distant chorus of human voices. Against their voracity no ordinary
bar is a bar at all. We had gone to their haunts provided with netting
which at home gave immunity, but through its meshes these mosquitos
inserted their bills, then their heads, then struggled through bodily,
and came down up