“We mustn’t lose count of the days,” he said to Dick.
“Oh, there won’t be so many of them as all that,” Dick answered.
Hugh said nothing. Oscar had talked to him more fully than to his comrade about the task of righting John Edmonds’ affairs.
“It may not be so simple to put them in order as he hopes it will,” he had said, “so the time may be three weeks or a month or perhaps more. I will not hide from you the chance that, if there is very bad weather soon, I may not get back to you for some time. The snow can lie very deep in these valleys.”
“Snow,” Hugh had exclaimed, “why, it is only October!”
“Remember it will be November in a week,” Oscar replied, “and that this is a climate very different from yours. Here the winter begins early and lasts long and we have to be ready for it. There are supplies enough to last until spring, I have made sure of that, and plenty of wood, so that there is no danger of your needing anything. I will come back to you as soon as I can, but at this season all plans go by the weather.”
So Hugh had written a long letter to his father for Oscar to send, explaining why mail must be uncertain and just what he was doing.
“I ought to learn a great deal from this experience,” he ended, “enough to make even you feel that I am fit for service in France. I am bound that I will make it before I am twenty-one.”
It did not look much like winter to-day, even though the woods were so bare and the hillsides so brown. The boys had arranged that they would hunt and fish as much as possible for the purpose of saving Oscar’s stores for future use, and that they would go out alone on alternate days, so that the cottage might never be left unguarded. Neither one was ever to go so far away that a certain signal of rifle shots could not call him back. It was agreed that Hugh was to go shooting the first day, so, very blithely, he had made ready, shouldered his rifle and started forth.
He stopped a moment before the door to look down at the lake, which was very still this morning and very blue. He knew now why Oscar had elected to start before the dawn, for two canoes were skimming over the quiet surface, pirate vessels, although not of the accepted type. Often before Hugh had seen them patrolling these waters that Half-Breed Jake called his own, swift craft, dark and sinister, ready to shoot any man or sink any boat that ventured through Harbin’s Channel. Harbin, he had learned, was an explorer who, fifty years ago, had coasted up and down Red Lake, mapping the islands and the bays and inlets. His boat had been wrecked in this channel: one could see its bleaching bones still wedged among the rocks, and he himself had perished at the hands of hostile Indians. Although the Indians had now nearly vanished and civilization had, since then, been creeping steadily nearer, the upper reaches of Red Lake were still as wild, unexplored and perilous as in his day. But—thus Hugh registered a vow within himself—they would soon be so no longer.