The canoe, keeping about thirty yards from shore, glided silently down the long lake. The "fat" pine flamed smoky and red, and it cast long, wavering reflections on the water. Once an animal, probably a muskrat, startled them by diving noisily. A duck, sleeping on the water, rose with a frantic splutter and flurry of wings. Then, fifty yards farther, there was a sudden splash near the shore, then a crashing in the bushes, and a dying thump-thump in the distance.
Horace swung his rifle round, but he was too late. The deer had not stopped to stare at the light for an instant. A jack light ought to have a reflector, but the boys had no means of contriving one.
Unspeakably disappointed, they moved slowly on again. They started no more game, and at last reached the lower end of the lake. Here Mac stopped to renew the torch, which had almost burned out.
Then they turned up the other side of the lake, on the home stretch. No living thing except themselves seemed to be on the water that night. The shore shoaled far out. Once the keel scraped over a bottom of soft mud. Lilies grew along the shore, and sometimes extended out so far that the canoe brushed the half-grown pads.
Suddenly Fred felt the canoe swerve slightly, and head toward the land. Horace raised the rifle. Fred had seen nothing, but after straining his eyes ahead, he made out two faint spots of light in the darkness, at about the height of a man's head. Could it be a deer? The balls of light remained perfectly motionless.
Without a splash the canoe glided closer. Fred thought that he could make out the outline of the animal's head, and clenched his hands in anxiety. Why did not Horace shoot?
Suddenly a blinding flash blazed out from the rifle, and the report crashed across the water. There was a splash, followed immediately by a noise of violent thrashing in the water near the land.
Fred and Mac shouted together. With great paddle strokes, Mac drove the canoe forward, and at last Horace leaped out. The others followed him. The deer was down, struggling in the water. It was dead before they reached it. Horace's bullet had broken its neck.
"Hurrah!" Fred cried. "This makes us safe. This'll last us all the way home."
It was a fine young buck—so heavy that they had hard work to lift it into the canoe. Far up the lake they could see their camp-fire, and they paddled toward it with the haste of half-starved men.