Prime knew his companion well enough by this time to be willing to trust her with the grewsome truth.
"I don't know what connection the canoe may have had with our kidnapping, if any, but I am going to tell you something that I didn't care to tell you until we were far enough away from the scene of it. We reasoned that there were two owners for the canoe, arguing from the two rifles and the two hunting-knives. Do you know why they didn't turn up while we were waiting for them?"
"No."
"It was because they couldn't. They were dead."
"You knew it at the time?" she asked.
"Yes. I found them. It was in a little glade just below our camp at the river-head. They had fought a duel with knives. It was horrible, and I thought it best not to tell you—it seemed only the decent thing not to tell you."
"When did you find them?"
"It was when I went over to the river on the excuse of trying to get some berries while you were cooking supper. I had seen the canoe when I went after the can of water. Instead of looking for berries I began to hunt around for the owners, thinking that probably they were camped somewhere near by. I didn't find any traces of a camp; but in the glade there were the ashes of five fires arranged in the shape of a Greek cross: one fire in the middle and one at the end of each arm. This mystified me still more, but it was then growing so dark that it was no use to look farther. Just as I was leaving the glade I stumbled over the two men, locked in each other's arms; they had evidently been dead for some hours, or maybe days."
"How perfectly frightful!" she exclaimed. "I don't wonder that you looked ill when you came back."
"It nearly knocked me out," Prime confessed. "But I realized at once that it wasn't necessary to multiply the shock by two. After you were asleep that night I went over and buried the two men—weighted them with stones and sunk them in the river, since I didn't have anything to dig with. Afterward, while I was searching for the other knife, I found a little buckskin bag filled with English sovereigns, lying, as I supposed, where one of them had dropped it. It seemed to indicate the motive for the desperate fight."