“Do you know what time it is?” asked Alex, smiling.
“No,” said Rob. “Why, it’s almost midnight,” he added, as he looked at his watch.
“We’ve made a long day of it,” said Alex, “almost too long. We don’t want to be in too big a hurry.”
“How far do you think we’ve come, Alex?” asked Jesse. “It seemed like a long way to me.”
“Well I don’t know exactly, Mr. Jess,” said Alex, “because there are no roads in this country, you see, and we have to guess. But it must have been about noon when we got out of the last lake after we finished fishing. We’ve doubled on the portage, which made that something like a mile, and I suppose took about an hour. We fished about an hour, and it took us about an hour to clear out the little creek and go through a mile or so down to the main river. We’ve been running seven or eight hours pretty steadily. Maybe we’ve come thirty or forty miles, I don’t know.”
“Well, I know I’m tired,” said John, “and I can’t even eat another trout.”