Having thus given a plausible reason for a longer absence, he went back to the canoe to look in the fading light for tracks in the sand. Now that he made a business of searching for them, he found plenty of them; heelless tracks as if the feet that had made them had been shod with moccasins. A little farther down the stream-side there were broken bushes and a small earth-slide to show where somebody had scrambled up to the forest level. Following the trail he soon found himself in a natural clearing, grass-grown and running back from the river a hundred yards or more. In the centre of this clearing he came upon the ashes of five separate fires, disposed in the form of a rude cross.
Still there was no sign of the canoe-owners themselves, and the discovery of the curiously arranged ash-heaps merely added more mystery to mystery. The fires had been dead for some time. Of this Prime assured himself by thrusting his hand into the ashes. Clearly the camp, if it were a camp, had been abandoned for some hours at least. The gathering dusk warned him that it would be useless to try to track the fire-makers, and he turned to make his way back to the lake shore and supper.
It was in the edge of the glade, under the gloomy shadow of a giant spruce, that he stumbled blindly over some reluctantly yielding obstacle and fell headlong. Regaining his feet quickly with a nameless fear unnerving him, he stooped and groped under the shadowing tree, drawing back horror-stricken when his hand came in contact with the stiffened arm of a corpse.
He had matches in his pocket, and he found one and lighted it. His hand shook so that the match went out and he had to light another. By the brief flare of the second match he saw a double horror. Lying in a little depression between two spreading roots of the spruce were the bodies of two men locked in a death-grip. Another match visualized the tragedy in all its ghastly details. The men were apparently Indians, or half-breeds, and it had been a duel to the death, fought with knives.
IV
IN THE NIGHT
Prime made his way to the camp-fire at the lake edge, a prey to many disturbing emotions. Having lived a life practically void of adventure, the sudden collision with bloody tragedy shocked him prodigiously. Out of the welter of emotions he dug a single fixed and unalterable decision. Come what might, his companion must be kept from all knowledge of the duel and its ghastly outcome.
"Dear me! You look as if you had seen a ghost," was the way the battle of concealment was opened when he came within the circle of firelight. "Did you find any berries?"