keen-eyed guide, standing slightly to one
side, considered our abdominal profiles, and the look he cast at my
companion said as plainly as words, "Well, I see you've brought a spare
set along with you in case of a puncture."

But he did not come right out and say a thing so utterly tactless. What he
did say, in a worried tone, was that he was sorry now he had not fetched
along a much more powerful horse for me to ride on. He had a good big
chunky work animal, not fast but very strong in the back, he said, which
would have answered my purposes first rate.

I experienced another disillusioning jolt. Could it be that this practiced
woodsman's eye actually appraised me as being as heavy as my mate, or even
heavier? Surely he must be wrong in his judgments. The point was that I
woefully was wrong in mine. How true it is that we who would pluck the
mote from behind a fellow being's waistcoat so rarely take note of the
beam which we have swallowed crosswise!

Even so, a great light was beginning to percolate to my innermost
consciousness. A grave doubt pestered me through our days of camping there
in the autumnal wilderness. When we had emerged from the woods and had
reached Montreal on the homeward trip I enticed my friend upon a
penny-in-the-slot weighing machine in the Montreal station and I observed
what he weighed; and then when he stepped aside I unostentatiously weighed
myself, and in the box score credited myself with a profound shock; also
with an error, which should have been entered up a long time before that.

Approximately, we were of the same height and in bone structure not
greatly unlike. I had figured that daily tramping after game should have
taken a few folds of superfluous flesh off my frame, and so, no doubt, it
had done. Yet I had pulled the spindle around the face of the dial to a
point which recorded for me a total of sixteen pounds and odd ounces more
than his penny had registered for him.

If he was fat, unmistakably and conclusively fat and he was--what then was
I? In Troy weight--Troy where the hay scales come from--the answer was
written. I was fat as fat, or else the machine had lied. And as between me
and that machine I could pick the liar at the first pick.

CHAPTER V

_On Acquiring Some Snappy Pores_

That night on the sleeper a splendid resolution sprouted within me. Next
morning when we arrived home it was ready and ripe for plucking. I would
trim myself down to more lithesom