CHAPTER XV
Half awake, Fred made a blind snatch at the rifle that had been across his lap. It was gone.
The sky was bright with dawn. Ten feet away stood three men with leveled rifles. Horace and Mac were sitting up, holding their hands above their heads and looking dazed.
"I said you pups wouldn't bark so loud next time," remarked one of the newcomers. It was the man that had pretended to be a ranger. With him was the slim, dark fellow whom they had seen outside the trappers' shack, and the third was a tall, elderly, bearded man, who looked more intelligent and more vicious than the others.
None of the boys said anything, but Horace gave Fred a reproachful glance that almost broke his heart. It was his fault that this had happened, and he knew it. Tears of rage and shame started to his eyes. He looked about desperately for a weapon. He would gladly risk his life to get his companions out of the awkward scrape into which his negligence had plunged them. But the ranger had taken the boys' rifle, and the half-breed had picked up the shotgun.
With a grin of triumph the trappers went to the fox cage, peered at the animals, and talked eagerly in low voices. The boys watched them in suspense. Were they going to kill the foxes?
Presently two of the men picked up the cage and carried it down to the river. The light was strong enough now so that Fred could see the bow of a bark canoe drawn up on the shore. They put the cage into the canoe. Then the half-breed laid his rifle and the stolen shotgun beside it, and paddled down the river. The other two men lifted the boys' Peterboro into the water.
"You aren't going to rob us of our firearms and our canoe, too, are you?" cried Horace desperately. "You might as well murder us!"
"Guess you won't need the guns," said the third trapper. "You've got grub, I see, and we durstn't leave you any canoe to foller us up in."
The two men pushed off the Peterboro and followed the birch canoe down the river at a rapid pace. In two minutes they were out of sight round a bend.
There was a dead silence. Fred could not meet the eyes of his companions. He turned away, pretended to look for something, and fairly broke down.
"Brace up, Fred!" said his brother. "It can't be helped, and we're not blaming you. It might have happened to any of us."
"If you'd been awake you might have got shot," said Mac, "and that would have been a good deal worse for every one concerned."
But Fred was inconsolable. Through his tears, he stammered that he wished he had been shot. They had lost the foxes, they were stranded and destitute, and they stood a good chance of never getting out alive.
"Nonsense!" said Mac, with forced cheerfulness. "We were in a far worse fix last winter, and we came out on top."
"The first thing to do is to have some grub," added Horace. "Then we'll talk about it."
Looking with calculating eyes at the lump of meat, he cut the slices of venison very thin. There was about twenty pounds left. They roasted the meat he had cut off, and ate it; then Horace unfolded his pocket map and spread it on the ground.
They were probably forty miles from the Height of Land. It was twelve miles across the long carry, and at least forty more to the nearest inhabited point—almost a hundred miles in all. There was a chance, however, that they might meet some party of prospectors or Indians.
"It's terribly rough traveling afoot," said Horace. "We could hardly make it in less than two weeks. Besides, our shoes are nearly gone now."
"And that piece of venison will never last us for two weeks!" cried Macgregor.
"Oh, you can often knock down a partridge with a stick," said Horace.
"If we only had a canoe!" Mac exclaimed, with a burst of rage. "I'd run those thieves down if I had to follow them to Hudson Bay!"
They all agreed on that point, but it was useless to think of following them without a canoe. The boys would have all they could do to save their own lives; a hundred-mile journey on foot across that wilderness, without arms and with almost no provisions, was a desperate undertaking.
"Well, we've got no choice," said Horace, after a dismal silence. "We must put ourselves on rations of about half a pound of meat a day, and we'll lay a bee-line course by the compass for the trail over the Height of Land."
He marked the course on the map, and the boys studied it in silence. The sun had risen by this time, but the boys were not anxious to break camp and start on that journey which would perhaps prove fatal to all of them. They lingered, talking, discussing, hesitating, reluctant to make the start.
Fred had not contributed a single word to the discussion. He had barely managed to swallow a little breakfast, and was too miserable to join in the talk. He knew how slim their chances were; he imagined how the party would struggle on, growing weaker daily, until—
If only they had a canoe! If only they could run the robbers down and ambush them in their turn! And as he puzzled on the problem, an idea—an inspiration—flashed into his mind.
He bent over, and studied the map intently for a second.
"Look! Look here!" he cried, wildly. "What fools we are! We can overtake those fellows—catch 'em—cut 'em off before they get anywhere—and get back our grub, and the foxes, and the canoe—everything—why—"
"What's that? What do you mean?" cried Horace and Mac together.
Fred placed a trembling finger on the map.
"See, this is where we are, isn't it? Those thieves will go down here to the mouth of the Smoke River, and turn up it to their camp. They didn't have much outfit with them; so they'll go back to their shanty. It's about fifty miles round by the way they'll go, but if we cut straight across country—this way—we'd strike the Smoke in twenty-five miles, and be there before them."
"I do believe you've hit something, Fred!" Mac exclaimed.
In fact, the Smoke and the Missanabie Rivers made the arms of an acute angle. Between twenty and thirty miles straight to the northwest would bring them out on the former stream somewhere in the neighborhood of "Buck Rapids."
"Let's see!" calculated Horace hurriedly. "They can run down to the mouth of the Smoke in a few hours from here. After that it'll be slower work, but they'll have the portage trails that we cut, and they ought to get up beyond the long lake by this evening. Can we get across in time to head 'em off?"
"We must. Of course we can!" Fred insisted. "It's our only chance, and you both know it. We never could get home with our boots gone, and with the food we have, but this venison will last us across to the Smoke."
"Patch our boots up with the deerskin!" cried Mac. "We'll ambush 'em. We'll catch 'em on a hard carry. Only let me get my hands on 'em!"
"Then we haven't a minute to lose!" said Horace.
"Let's be off!" cried Fred, springing up.
First of all, however, they repaired their tattered boots by folding pieces of the raw deerhide round them and lashing them in place with thongs. It was clumsy work at the best; but Mac rolled up the rest of the hide to take with him, in case they should have to make further repairs.
Horace consulted the map and the compass again, and picked up the lump of venison, which, with the deerskin, constituted their only luggage. In less than half an hour from the time Fred had hit upon his plan they were off, running through the undergrowth on the twenty-five-mile race to the Smoke River.
None of them knew what sort of country the course would pass over. The map for that part of the region was incomplete and no more than approximately accurate, so that the boys were not at all sure that their guess at the distance to the Smoke River was correct. But they did know that now that they had started on the race, their lives depended upon their winning it. Fred took the lead at once, tearing through the thickets, tripping, stumbling.
"Easy, there!" called Horace. "We mustn't do ourselves up at the start."
Fred slackened his pace somewhat, but continued to keep in front. For nearly a mile from the river the land sloped gently upward through dense thickets of birch. Then the birches thinned, and finally gave way to evergreen, and the rising ground became rough with gravel and rock. The slope changed to undulating billows of hills, covered with stone of every size, from gravel to small boulders, and over it all grew a stubbly jungle of cedar and jack-pine, seldom more than six feet high.
It was a rough, broken country, and the boys had to slacken their pace somewhat; to make things worse, it presently began to rain. First came a driving drizzle, then a heavy downpour, with a strong southwest wind. The rocks streamed with water, and the boys were drenched; but the heavy rain presently settled again to a soaking drizzle that threatened to continue all day.
Through the rain they struggled ahead; sometimes they found a clear space where they could run; sometimes they came upon wet, tangled shrubbery that impeded them sadly. They kept hoping for easier traveling; but those broken, rocky hills stretched ahead for miles. At last the trees became even more sparse, and the boys encountered a whole hillside covered with a mass of split rock.
Over this litter of sandstone they crawled and stumbled at what seemed a snail's pace. They were desperately anxious to hurry, but they knew that a slip on those wet rocks might mean a broken leg.
A rain-washed slope of gravel came next; they went down it at a trot, and then encountered another hillside covered with huge, loose stones. They scrambled over it as best they could, and ran down another slope; then trees became more abundant, and soon they were again traveling over low, rolling hills clothed in jack-pine scrub.
With marvelous endurance Fred still held the lead. He went as if driven by machinery, with his head down and his lips clenched; he did not speak a word. He was supposed to be the weakest of the party, but even Macgregor, a trained cross-country runner, found himself falling farther and farther behind.
At eleven o'clock Horace called a halt. The rain had almost stopped, and the boys, lighting a small fire, roasted generous slices of venison. There was no need of sparing the meat now. Either plenty of food or death was at the end of the journey.
No sooner had they eaten it than Fred sprang up again.
"How you fellows can sit here I can't understand!" he exclaimed, nervously. "I'm going on. Are you coming?"
Mac and Horace followed him. The land seemed to be sloping continually to lower levels; the woods thickened into a sturdy, tangled growth of hemlock and tamarack that they had hard work to penetrate. They presently caught a glimpse of water ahead, and came to the shore of a small, narrow lake that curved away between rounded, dark hillsides. They had to go round the lake, and lost two or three miles by the détour. As they hurried up the shore a bull moose sprang from the water, paused an instant to look back, and crashed into the thickets. It would have been an easy shot if they had had the rifle.
Round the end of the lake low hills rose abruptly from the shore. After scrambling up the slippery slope of the hills they reached the top, and saw ahead of them an endless stretch of wild hills and forests; there was not a landmark that they recognized.
Horace guessed that they had come about fifteen miles. Mac thought that it was much more. They agreed that they had broken the back of the journey, and that if their strength held out, they could reach the Smoke that day.
"Suppose we were—to find the diamond-beds now!" said Mac, between quick breaths.
"Don't talk to me about diamonds!" said Horace. "I never want to hear the word again."
On they went, up and down the hills, through the thickets and over the ridges; but they no longer went with the energy they had shown in the morning. With every mile their pace grew slower, and they were all beginning to limp. Fred still kept in front, with his face set in grim determination. About the middle of the afternoon Horace came up with him, stopped him with a hand on his shoulder, and looked into his face.
Fred's eyes were bright and feverish. His face was pale and spotted with red blotches, and he breathed heavily through his open mouth.
"You've got to stop!" said his brother firmly. "You're going on your nerves. A little farther, and you'll collapse—go down like a shot."
"I—I'm all right!" said Fred thickly. "Got to get on—got to make it in time!"
But Horace was firm. First they built a smudge to keep off the flies; then they made fresh repairs to their shoes; and finally they stretched themselves flat to rest. But in spite of their fatigue, they were too highly strung to stay quiet. They knew that a delay of an hour might lose the race for them. After resting for less than half an hour, they got up and went plunging through the woods again.
They believed now that the Smoke River could not be more than five or six miles away. From every hilltop they hoped to catch sight of it, or at least to see some spot that they had passed while prospecting.
But although all the landscape seemed strange, they doggedly continued the struggle. The sun was sinking low over the western ridges now; toiling desperately on, they left mile after mile behind, but still the Smoke River did not come into sight. At last Macgregor sat down abruptly upon a log.
"I'd just as soon die here as anywhere," he said.
"You're right. We'll stop, and go on by moonrise," said Horace. "Grub's what we need now."
"Why, we're almost at the end! We can't stop now!" Fred cried.
"We won't lose anything," said his brother. "The trappers will be camping, too, about this time. If we don't rest now we'll probably never get to the Smoke at all."
Staggering with fatigue, he set about getting wood for a fire. Mac and Fred helped him, and when they had built a fire they broiled some of the deer meat. Fred could hardly touch the food. Horace and Macgregor ate only a little, and almost as they ate they nodded, and dropped asleep from sheer fatigue.
Fred knew that he, too, ought to sleep, but he could not even lie down. His brain burned, his muscles twitched, and he felt strung like a taut wire. Leaving his companions asleep, he started to scout ahead. He went like one in a dream, hardly conscious of anything except the overwhelming necessity of getting forward. His course took him over a wooded ridge and down a hillside, and at last he came upon a tiny creek. Stumbling, sometimes falling, but always pushing on, he followed the course of the creek for a mile or two; suddenly he found himself on the shore of a large and rapid river, into which the creek emptied.
Furious at the obstacle, he looked for a place where he could cross the river.
It was too deep for him to wade across it, and too swift for him to swim it. He hurried up the bank, looking for a place where he could ford it, and at last came to a stretch of short, violent rapids.
He was about to turn back when he caught sight of axe marks in the undergrowth. Some one had cut a trail for the carry round the rapid. He stared at the axe marks, and then at the river. Suddenly his dazed brain cleared.
He recognized the spot. He recognized the trail that he himself had helped to cut. He had found the Smoke River!