"The brains are still available," asserted the undaunted one. "Go and find some pine pitch and we'll mix it with the spruce."
This experiment promised better success. A gluey mixture resulted that stuck, not only to the canoe body and the patch, but to their fingers and to everything it touched. Inventing still further, they contrived a rude clamp to hold the patch in place while it was drying, if by good hap the glue would consent to dry at all; and with the new paddles whittled and scraped into shape, there was nothing to do but to wait upon the drying process.
Prime spent the afternoon fishing, with the tackle found in one of the gun-cases, and was lucky enough to accumulate a noble string of trout. Lucetta would not say what she was going to do, merely hinting that Prime's absence until supper-time would be a boon. Only the buzzard swinging in slow circles overhead could have told tales of the doing after the young woman had obtained her meed of solitude in the little glade, and possibly the buzzard had seen a sufficient number of blanketed women washing clothes at a river brink not to be unduly stirred at the sight.
Later, Prime came in to exhibit his string of fish with true sportsman's pride, and again they feasted royally, forgetting their late tribulations, and looking forward half-regretfully to a resumption of their journey on the morrow.
"It is astonishing how rapidly one can revert to the cave-man type," was Prime's phrasing of the regret. "I have been a person of pavements and cement walks all my life, as I suppose you have—of the paved streets and all that they stand for. Yet I shall go back to them with something like reluctance. Shan't you?"
She did not reply to the direct question.
"You speak as if you had some assurance that we are approaching the pavements. Have you?"
"A bare hint. I fished along the river for about a mile down-stream, spying out the land—or the water—as I went, for future reference. We can't claim this region by the right of discovery. Somebody has been here before us."
"You didn't find a house?" she ventured.
"Oh, no; nothing like that. But I did find the stump of a tree, and the tree had been felled with an axe. It wasn't recently; the stump was old and moss-grown. But it was axe work just the same."