les south, but
speedily found my way blocked by the canal rapids. The river there
rushes through a deep and narrow canon strewn with sharp rocks, a
perilous pass at all times for the most expert canoeist. We did not
attempt it, but, making a landing in Deep Bay, took the safer portage
around. At the end of a two-mile tramp we reached a clearing at the
foot of the canon where the loggers had camped at one time. Black bass
and partridge go well together when a man is hungry, and there was
something so suggestive of birds about the place that I took a turn
around with my gun, while Aleck looked after the packs. Poking about
on the edge of the clearing, in the shadow of some big pines which the
lumbermen had spared, I came suddenly upon the most unlikely thing of
all in that wilderness, miles from any human habitation--a
burying-ground! Two mounds, each with a weather-beaten board for a
headstone, were all it contained; just heaps of sand with a few
withered shrubs upon them. But a stout fence of cedar slabs, roughly
fashioned into pickets, to keep prowling animals away, hedged them
in--evidence that some one had cared. "Ormand Morden," I read upon one
of the boards, cut deep to last with a jack-knife. The other, nailed
up in the shape of a cross, bore the name "M. McDonald." The date
under both names was the same: June 8, 1899.

What tragedy had happened here in the deep woods a year before? Even
while the question was shaping itself in my mind, it was answered by
another discovery. Slung on the fence at the foot of one grave was a
pair of spiked shoes; at the foot of the other the dead man's
shoepacks with sand and mud in them. Two river-drivers, then; drowned
in the rapids probably. I remembered the grave on Deadman's Island,
hard by the favorite haunt of the bass, which was still kept up after
thirty years, even as the memory of its lonely tenant lived on the
lake where another generation of woodsmen had replaced his. But what
was the old black brier-wood pipe doing on the head-rail between the
two graves? I looked about me with an involuntary start as I noticed
that the ashes of the last smoke were still in the bowl, expecting I
hardly knew what in the ghostly twilight of the forest.

Over our camp fire that evening Aleck set my fears at rest and told me
the story of the two graves, a tale of every-day heroism of the kind
of which life on the frontier has many to tell, to the credit of our
poor human nature. He was "