At noon the road plunged out of the scant jack-pine forest into the gloom of a hemlock swamp. Toppy shuddered as he contemplated what the fate of a man might be who should be unfortunate enough to get lost in that swamp. A mile in the swamp, on a slight knoll, they came to a tiny cabin guarding a gate across the road. An old, bearded woodsman came out of the cabin and opened the gate, and the hunchback pulled up and proceeded to feed his team.
“Dinner’s waiting inside,” called the gate-tender. “Come in and eat, miss—and you, too; I suppose you’re hungry?” he added to Toppy.
“And hurry up, too,” growled the hunchback. “I give you twenty minutes.”
“Thank you very much,” said the girl, diving into her suitcase. “I’ve brought my own lunch.”
She brought out some sandwiches and proceeded to nibble at them without moving from the sleigh. Toppy tumbled into the cabin in company with the hunchback driver. A rough meal was on the table and they fell to without a word. Toppy noticed that the old woodsman sat on a bench near the door where he could keep an eye on the road. Above the bench hung a pair of field-glasses, a repeating shotgun and a high-power Winchester rifle.
“Any hunting around here?” asked Toppy cheerily.
“Sometimes,” said the old watcher with a smile that made Toppy wonder.
He did not pursue the subject, for there was something about the lonely cabin, the bearded old man, and the rifle on the wall that suggested something much more grim than sport.
The driver soon bolted his meal and went back to the sleigh. Toppy followed, and twenty minutes after pulling up they were on the road again. With each mile that they passed now the swamp grew wilder and the gloom of the wilderness more oppressive. To right and left among the trees Toppy made out stretches of open water, great springs and little creeks which never froze and which made the swamp even in Winter a treacherous morass.
Toward the end of the short afternoon the swamp suddenly gave way to a rough, untimbered ridge. Red rocks, which Toppy later learned contained iron ore, poked their way like jagged teeth through the snow. The sleigh mounted the ridge, the runners grating on bare rock and dirt, dipped down into a ravine between two ridges, swung off almost at right angles in a cleft in the hills—and before Toppy realised that the end of the drive had come, they were in full view of a large group of log buildings on the edge of a dense pine forest and were listening to the roar of the waters of Cameron Dam.