Then Bob, after thanking Mr. Forbes, rowed back to the Maid of the North, too full of excitement and anticipation to sleep.
With the first ray of morning light the anchor was weighed, the sails hoisted and but two days lay between Bob and home.
As he stood on the deck of the Maid of the North and drank in the wild, rugged beauty of the scene around him Bob thought of that day, which seemed so long, long ago, when he and his mother, broken hearted and disconsolate were going home with little Emily, and how he had looked away at those very hills and the inspiration had come to him that led to the journey from which he was now returning. Tears came to his eyes and he said to himself,
"Sure th' Lard be good. 'Twere He put un in my head t' go, an' He were watchin' over me an' carin' for me all th' time when I were thinkin' He were losin' track o' me. I'll never doubt th' Lard again."
XXV[ToC]
THE BREAK-UP
One evening a month after Ed Matheson started out with his gruesome burden to Wolf Bight, Dick Blake was sitting alone in the tilt at the junction of his and Ed's trails, smoking his after supper pipe and meditating on the happenings of the preceding weeks. There were some things in connection with the tragedy that he had never been able to quite clear up. Why, for instance, he asked himself, did Micmac John steal the furs and then leave them in the tilt where they were found? Had the half-breed been suddenly smitten by his conscience? That seemed most unlikely, for Dick had never discovered any indication that Micmac possessed a conscience. No possible solution of the problem presented itself. A hundred times he had probed the question, and always ended by saying, as he did now,