"A wild and woolly wilderness," he reported; "just a trifle more of it than you can see from here. The lake is five or six miles wide and perhaps twice as long. There are low hills to the north and woods everywhere."
"And no houses or anything?"
"Nothing; for all I could see, we might be the only two human beings on the face of the earth."
"You seem to be quite cheerful about it," she retorted.
He grinned good-naturedly. "That is a matter of temperament. I'd be grouchy enough if it would do any good. I shall lose my motor trip through New England."
"Think—think hard!" the young woman pleaded. "Since there is no sign of a road, we must have come in a boat; in that case we can't be very far from Quebec. Surely there must be some one living on the shore of a lake as big as this. We must walk until we find a house."
"We'll do anything you say," Prime agreed; and they set out together, following the lake shore to the left, chiefly because the beach broadened in that direction and so afforded easy walking.
A tramp of a mile northward scarcely served to change the point of view. There was no break in the encircling forest, and at the end of the mile they came to a deeply indented bay, where the continuing shore was in plain view for a doubling of another mile. The search for inhabitants seeming to promise nothing in this direction, they turned and retraced their steps to the breakfast camp, still puzzling over the tangle of mysteries.
"Can't you think of any way of accounting for it?" the young woman urged for the twentieth time in the puzzlings.
"I can think of a million ways—all of them blankly impossible," said Prime. "It's simply a chaotic joke!"