belongings and scanned the
almost illegible writing on the back of the cardboard mount. He made out
the date quite easily now, impressed in the cardboard by the point of a
pencil. It was only a little more than a year old. It was unaccountable
why this discovery should affect him as it did. He made no effort to
measure or sound the satisfaction it gave him--this knowledge that the
girl had stood so recently on that rock beside the pool. He was
beginning to personalize her unconsciously, beginning to think of her
mentally as the Girl. She was a bit friendly. With her looking at him
like that he did not feel quite so alone with himself. And there could
not be much of a change in her since that yesterday of a year ago, when
some one had startled her there.

It was Father Roland's voice that made him wrap up the picture again,
this time not in its old covering, but in a silk handkerchief which he
had pawed out of his bag, and which he dropped back again, and locked
in. Thoreau was telling the Missioner about David's early rising when
the latter reappeared. They shook hands, and the Missioner, looking
David keenly in the eyes, saw the change in him.

"No need to tell me you had a good night!" he exclaimed.

"Splendid," affirmed David.

The window was blazing with the golden sun now; it shot through where
the frost was giving way, and a ray of it fell like a fiery shaft on
Marie's glossy head as she bent over the table. Father Roland pointed to
the window with one hand on David's arm.

"Wait until you get out into _that_," he said. "This is just a
beginning, David--just a beginning!"

They sat down to breakfast, fish and coffee, bread and potatoes--and
beans. It was almost finished when David split open his third piece of
fish, white as snow under its crisp brown, and asked quite casually:

"Did you ever hear of the Stikine River, Father?"

Father Roland sat up, stopped his eating, and looked at David for a
moment as though the question struck an unusual personal interest in
him.

"I know a man who lived for a great many years along the Stikine," he
replied then. "He knows every mile of it from where it empties into the
sea at Point Rothshay to the Lost Country between Mount Finlay and the
Sheep Mountains. It's in the northern part of British Columbia, with its
upper waters reaching into the Yukon. A wild country. A country less
known than it was sixty years ago, when there was a gold rush up over
the old telegraph