"Let's see!" calculated Horace hurriedly. "They can run down to the mouth of the Smoke in a few hours from here. After that it'll be slower work, but they'll have the portage trails that we cut, and they ought to get up beyond the long lake by this evening. Can we get across in time to head 'em off?"
"We must. Of course we can!" Fred insisted. "It's our only chance, and you both know it. We never could get home with our boots gone, and with the food we have, but this venison will last us across to the Smoke."
"Patch our boots up with the deerskin!" cried Mac. "We'll ambush 'em. We'll catch 'em on a hard carry. Only let me get my hands on 'em!"
"Then we haven't a minute to lose!" said Horace.
"Let's be off!" cried Fred, springing up.
First of all, however, they repaired their tattered boots by folding pieces of the raw deerhide round them and lashing them in place with thongs. It was clumsy work at the best; but Mac rolled up the rest of the hide to take with him, in case they should have to make further repairs.
Horace consulted the map and the compass again, and picked up the lump of venison, which, with the deerskin, constituted their only luggage. In less than half an hour from the time Fred had hit upon his plan they were off, running through the undergrowth on the twenty-five-mile race to the Smoke River.
None of them knew what sort of country the course would pass over. The map for that part of the region was incomplete and no more than approximately accurate, so that the boys were not at all sure that their guess at the distance to the Smoke River was correct. But they did know that now that they had started on the race, their lives depended upon their winning it. Fred took the lead at once, tearing through the thickets, tripping, stumbling.
"Easy, there!" called Horace. "We mustn't do ourselves up at the start."
Fred slackened his pace somewhat, but continued to keep in front. For nearly a mile from the river the land sloped gently upward through dense thickets of birch. Then the birches thinned, and finally gave way to evergreen, and the rising ground became rough with gravel and rock. The slope changed to undulating billows of hills, covered with stone of every size, from gravel to small boulders, and over it all grew a stubbly jungle of cedar and jack-pine, seldom more than six feet high.