“Sure, I help you, Tom,” he agreed. “We fight him if he come. You watch for him—I hunt grub—then we fight. We do firs’ rate.”
To Charlie’s aboriginal mind it perhaps seemed a reduction of life to the natural and simple elements of fighting the enemy and getting something to eat; but Tom was not able to take it so easily. He was greatly cheered by Charlie’s companionship, however, and he knew that the Indian boy’s woodcraft would make him most useful as a provider of game. It would be needed. Tom had none too much provision, and the two youthful appetites made deadly inroads on the supplies.
In fact, Charlie went out before dawn the very next morning and killed a deer—a feat which Tom had not yet performed. It was out of season, of course; but Charlie, being an Indian, was exempt from the game-laws, and they would need the meat.
It secured their food supply for a long time, and the Ojibway busied himself in cutting the venison in strips and drying it over a slow, smoky fire. It made a curiously tasteless mess when boiled, but Tom’s stomach was grown hardened to unsavory fare, and Charlie could eat and digest anything, and was anxious only that there should be enough of it.
From that time Charlie took charge of the provisioning, and spent most of the time prowling in the woods, almost always coming back with a hare, a duck, or some other game. He caught trout; he found an early nest of wild duck’s eggs, which he robbed without scruple. He hunted with an old, inferior, muzzle-loading shot-gun, and was a far worse shot than Tom; but he made up for it by craft, and he could have lived well in a country where the white boy would have starved.
Meanwhile Tom did little hunting. He had lost interest in the growing grass of the beaver meadow and in the planted rye of the last year’s field. His thought was concentrated on the quarry claim, for he felt not the slightest doubt that this was the valuable point—worth more than all the grain and hay the farm could grow for years. If he could put through a contract for that gravel and go back to Toronto with a profit of a few thousand dollars to show his father he would feel that he had redeemed all his dignity and laid the basis for a new life. But for the moment he could do nothing whatever, and it was maddening to feel his inability. He was afraid to leave the claim. He expected an attack from some direction, but he did not know where to look for it. Every day he went down to the lake and looked over the water, but he never saw any sign of a canoe or camp.
A week later Charlie had started to the spring for water before breakfast, when he stopped, stooped, scrutinized the ground, and came back hurriedly.
“Somebody been here las’ night!” he announced.
Tom went to look. He was unable to make out anything where the Indian boy pointed, nothing but a shapeless indentation in the dry earth.
“Yes—you look hard!” Charlie insisted, pointing to one spot after another; and at last with a cry of triumph he indicated the clear imprint of a moccasined foot in soft earth just below the spring.