ll guide him in another
direction."

Back in the pit-gloom, with a grim smile now and then relaxing the
tight-set compression of his thin lips, and with eyes that stared like
a night-owl's into the gloom ahead of him, Breault poled steadily on.

CHAPTER XXII

Dripping from the bog-holes and lathered with mud, it was the mystery
of Breault's noiseless presence somewhere near him in the still night
that drew Peter continually deeper into the swamp.

Half a dozen times he caught the scent of him in a quiet air that
seemed only now and then to rise up in his face softly, as if stirred
by butterflies' wings. Always it came from ahead, and Peter's mind
worked swiftly to the decision that where Breault was there also would
be Nada and Jolly Roger. Yet he caught the scent of neither of these
two, and that puzzled him.

Many times he found himself at the edge of the black lip of water, but
never quite at the right time to see a shadow in its darkness, or hear
the sound of Breault's pole.

But in the swamp, as he went on, he saw nothing but shadow, and heard
weird and nameless sounds which made his blood creep, even though his
courage was now full-grown within him.

He was not frightened at the ugly sputter of the owls, as in the days
of old. Their throaty menace and snapping beaks did not stop him nor
turn him aside. The slashing scrape of claws in the bark of trees and
the occasional crackling of brush were matters of intimate knowledge,
and he gave but little attention to them in his eagerness to reach
those who had gone ahead of him. What troubled him, and filled his eyes
with sudden red glares, were the oily gurgles of the pitfalls which
tried to suck him down; the laughing madness of muck that held him as
if living things were in it, and which spluttered and coughed when he
freed himself.

Half blinded at times, so that even the black shadows were blotted out,
he went on. And at last, coming again to the edge of the stream, he
heard a new kind of sound--the slow, steady dipping of Breault's pole.

He hurried on, finding harder ground under his feet, and came
noiselessly abreast of the man on his raft of cedar timbers. He could
almost hear his breathing. And very faintly he could see in the vast
gloom a shadow--a shadow that moved slowly against the background of a
still deeper shadow beyond.

But there was no scent of Nada or Jolly Roger, and whatever desire had
risen in him to make himself known was sm