He picked them up and tossed them into six feet of water. "By the time you've fished them out and mended your canoe I guess you won't want to follow us. If you do, you won't catch us napping again, and we'll shoot you on sight. Savez?"
The half-breed muttered some sullen response. The boys loaded the fox cage into the Peterboro, got in themselves, and shot down the river again in a fresh start for home. They left the trapper sitting on the rock, glaring after them.
Now that the strain was over and the fight won, the boys felt utterly exhausted. They kept on at as fast a pace as they could, however, and reached the Missanabie River a little after noon. There they stopped to cook dinner.
Once more they had hot, black voyageurs' tea, and fried flapjacks, and salt pork. It seemed the most delicious meal they had ever eaten; but when they had finished, they felt too weary to start up the Missanabie, and reckless of consequences, they lay down and slept for almost two hours.
Then they continued their journey with double energy, and made good progress for the rest of the day.
They were entirely out of fresh meat, and had nothing whatever to give the foxes, but fortunately Mac shot three spruce grouse that evening. They dropped the heads of the birds into the cage; the foxes devoured them with a voracity that indicated that the trappers had fed them nothing. Early the next morning Horace by a long shot killed a deer at the riverside.
It was a rough journey up the Missanabie, but not nearly so hard as the trip up the Smoke River had been. For eight days they paddled, poled, tracked, and portaged, until they came at last to the point where they had first launched the canoe.
The "long carry" over the Height of Land now confronted them. It is true that they had by no means so much outfit to carry now, but, on the other hand, they had no packers to help them. They had to make two journeys of it, and, as a further difficulty, one of the boys had to remain with the fox cage. As they reached the top of the ridge on their first journey, Macgregor turned and looked back over the wild landscape to the northwest.
"Somewhere over there," he murmured, "is the diamond country."
"Shut up!" exclaimed Horace, in exasperation.