The two castaways sheltered themselves under a great thick spruce, which the rain scarcely penetrated. The rain made the smoke hang lower, and it seemed to be mixed with steam—an impenetrable, reeking gray smother over the whole lake and the forest. But it was certain that the fire would go no further, with the wind falling and the woods wet.
For an hour or so they stood wretchedly under the big spruce. The fine drizzle penetrated the leaves at last, but it did not make much difference, as both of them were wet already to the skin. Harrison’s spirits flagged at last, and they said little, gazing out into the ghostly white drift of smoke and steam and rain.
“This won’t do,” Harrison exclaimed at last. “We’ve got to have something to eat—got to have a canoe. My canoe must have drifted ashore somewhere, and there was a package of grub tied in it. It’ll be soaked, but we can make something out of it. Let’s look for it.”
Tom agreed. Anything was better than standing there any longer hungry and shivering. They separated, Harrison going down toward the narrows, and Tom toward the upper end of the lake, and whoever discovered the canoe was to paddle in search of the other.
Tom discovered the lost canoe within a hundred yards, lying stranded upside down on the shore gravel. If they had only known it they might have left the place at any time that day. The food was gone, though. Only a string loop and the soaked relic of a paper package was left, greatly to Tom’s disappointment. But with the canoe he felt sure of being able to locate Charlie, who must have plenty of supplies with him.
Tom righted and launched the canoe, and shouted for Harrison, but the man was out of hearing. A spare paddle was lashed in the canoe, and Tom got aboard and struck out. It occurred to him that he might as well scout about for Charlie before rejoining Harrison, and he paddled out into the wet reek that overhung the lake.
He followed up the shore a little way and then struck straight across. At intervals he shouted, but got no answer. The other shore of the lake presently loomed up mistily, a desolation of wet ashes, tangles of half-burned thickets and steaming, smoking spruces. He half expected to find Charlie searching for him along this shore, and he paddled downward, looking out sharply for a canoe.
Nothing like a canoe showed, either on the water or ashore. Growing more anxious, for he was desperately hungry, Tom followed the shore down till he came to the narrows connecting the two lakes. At one time, not so long ago, these two lakes had been one, and the land about the narrows was low and sandy, cut with swampy hollows and densely overgrown with small evergreens. But the fire had swept over it, and the spruces and jack-pines were only stubs and skeletons with all their twigs and leafage burned away, leaving only the damp trunks standing amid sand, ashes, and ancient logs half buried in the earth.
As he came up Tom thought he dimly spied a canoe drawn ashore, and paddled up to it. But it was only a great log, laid bare by the burning off of the thickets. He drew up alongside it and stared about. Harrison was nowhere within his restricted area of vision, nor Charlie either, and it was hardly likely that the Indian boy would have gone down into the lower lake.
Tom sat there for a minute, discouraged, absently contemplating the scattered logs. Half consciously he realized that there were a great many of them, mostly showing above ground, that the ends of all of them were sawed square across, as if they had been cut by lumbermen. On the end of the log nearest him he noticed that the letters “D W” had been roughly cut with a tool.