“It was a cache,” Ganawa told the lads. “A place where somebody kept fur. But they must have had a camp close by,” he added. A dim trail led away from the cache to the other side of the narrow swamp, [[232]]and there was the camp-site plain enough, and several signs indicated that the campers had been white men. The camp showed a larger outside fireplace than Indians would have used, and they had cut much wood.
Bruce began at once to examine the cuts on the stumps near the camp-site, and very soon the young man, who was generally very calm, sprang up, swung his arms around and called: “I have found it, Father! I have found it! Look, here is the same ax-mark we found last fall at the camp-site on Lake Anjigami. I noticed the same marks on the logs in the cache cabin.”
“No, Bruce, you are mistaken,” Ray argued. “The ax-marks are not the same. The ax at this camp had a much smaller nick.”
“It had a smaller nick,” Bruce admitted, “and I can tell you why. The campers, of course, had no grindstone. They may have had a file or a small whetstone, or they may have used an ordinary rock to keep their ax in fair condition. Had they had a grindstone, [[233]]they would have given their ax a complete keen edge, but as it was they only reduced the nick in size. But you will notice that the nick is in the same place, near the front part of the ax.”
Both Ganawa and Ray were convinced that Bruce was right, but the question who these mysterious campers were was not at all solved by what they had found. Were they Jack Dutton and his partner or some unknown strangers? Perhaps two adventurous Frenchmen had penetrated into this region while it still contained an abundance of the most valuable fur-bearers: marten, beaver, and otter. All three of them searched carefully for signs to solve this riddle, but darkness came on before they had discovered any further clues to the solution of their problem.
“If this was Jack Dutton’s camp,” Bruce remarked as they walked along the trail, “something must have muddled his head. He does not meet us at Mackinac nor at the Soo, and he leaves no letter or word [[234]]with anybody. If there were whales in Lake Superior, I should say he suffered the fate of Jonah. A trader at the Soo told us that a man cannot disappear in the Indian country. It seems to me Jack Dutton did the trick to perfection.
“If the camp-sites we have found belonged to him, why didn’t he leave some kind of message? I have had a vague hope that we might find him in this region. It is the kind of country he and I used to talk and dream about when we were boys on the farm. But now I begin to fear that Jack is dead. Perhaps the wolves finished him as they came near doing with me. Jack was always a dare-devil and he would not realize that the wolves in this wild country are much bolder than they are in Vermont.”
Soon after daylight, the three hunters were again diligently searching for some clue that might point to the identity of the mysterious campers. Ray was the first who pointed out something that aroused some discussion. Who tore off half of the birch-bark [[235]]roof of the log cabin cache? A bear might have done it, but no claw-marks were visible. If it had been done by a storm, why were there no indications of a violent wind on the trees close by?
“Somebody tore off the roof,” Ganawa gave as his opinion, “but I cannot tell why he did not open the cache by pulling out the logs that were put in loose to serve as a door.”
Bruce followed a plan of his own in the search for a clue. He slowly walked around the old tepee poles of the camp-site in a gradually enlarging spiral. “If there is anything,” he thought, “I am bound to find it in this way.” And he did find a broad blaze on a rough old birch-tree and on the blaze was some lettering, but it was hard to read. The letters seemed to have been scratched in with the point of a knife and then blackened, or rather made dull gray, with a piece of pointed lead. Bruce’s heart beat fast and he forgot to call his friends as he tried to decipher the scrawls, and no [[236]]discoverer of long buried records has ever been more absorbed in deciphering their meaning than Bruce was in reading the words on the blaze: