Chip was in that canoe!
His avenging shot was stayed.
And now Old Tomah leaped down the path, rifle in hand.
One look at the vanishing canoe, and his own, floating out upon the lake, told him the tale, and without a word he turned and, plunging into the undergrowth, leaping like a deer over rock and chasm, vanished at the top of the ridge.
CHAPTER XII
“The man that won’t bear watchin’ needs it.” –Old Cy Walker.
While Chip, bound, gagged, and helpless in the half-breed’s canoe, was just entering the alder-choked outlet of this lake, twenty miles below and close to where the stream entered another lake, four men were launching their canoes.
“It was here,” Martin was saying to Hersey, “one moonlight night a year ago, that a friend of mine and myself saw a spectral man astride a log, just entering that bed of reeds, as I told you. Who or what it was, we could not guess; but as that spook canoeman went up this stream, we followed and discovered our hermit’s home.”
“Night-time and moonshine play queer pranks with our imagination,” Hersey responded. “I’m not a whit superstitious, and yet I’ve many a time seen what I thought to be a hunter creeping along the lake shore at night, and I once came near plugging a fat man in a shadowy glen. I was up on a cliff watching down into it, the day was cloudy, and ’way below I saw what I was sure was a bear crawling along the bank of the stream. I had my rifle raised and was only waiting for a better sight, when up rose the bear and I saw a human face. For a moment it made me faint, and since then I make doubly sure before shooting at any object in the woods.”