Nothing was in sight. There could be nothing, he told himself.
“But I’m going to settle this,” he reflected, after a moment. “Either something’s after me, or there isn’t. I’ll just wait here a bit, and end this foolishness.”
Half ashamed of himself, he dragged the canoe ashore and hid it. Then he took his rifle, and ambushed himself just at the peninsula where the two rivers met, well out of sight under a thicket of willows, and waited. It would be a relief to settle this suspense at the cost of an hour’s time.
Silence settled down, except for the rush of the meeting currents. A mink ran down the shore and into a log heap, popping out again and into the water, busy about its hunting. A pair of wild ducks came swimming down the Wawista, dipping their heads deep, and halted close opposite his ambush. He could have shot the head off one of them, and he contemplated doing it, to secure a bit of fresh meat. His suspicions of pursuit were vanishing. He had been there a long time—an hour, surely. It was scarcely worth while to wait longer, he thought, when the ducks suddenly splashed into flight, and went off quacking over the tree-tops.
Tom’s heart bounded. He caught a glimpse of a canoe coming slowly down the Wawista. The next moment it was in full view.
A single man was in it, handling the paddle with the skill of a practised voyageur; and even at fifty yards Tom recognized the glint of the fox-colored hair under the cap. The paddler paused at the forks of the river, held the canoe balanced while he looked this way and that, and then, as if by some intuition, turned up the Fish River as Tom had done.
The canoe, hugging the shore, came within twenty feet of the willow clump, when Tom stood up suddenly, with the repeater at his shoulder.
“Halt!” he hailed.
McLeod cast a sudden glance at him and then dropped his paddle and reached back like lightning for the gun that stood behind him.
“None of that! Hands up, now—quick! I’ll shoot!” Tom yelled at him; and the woodsman slowly put up his hands, with a grin like a trapped weasel. The canoe drifted backward.