'I am not, Lifter. I feel just as happy with you as with him. But mind do not tell him that I said so.'
'Oh, you need not trouble about that. I am too cunneen to run risks with Joe.'
Then the party ascended the stream, and found several still pools of water varying from myrtle to coffee brown in colour. Each such piece of still water had a congregation of foam bubbles; and no sooner was the cast made than the float went down like a stone.
In the delightful excitement Roland frequently forgot the perils that surrounded him; was often quite oblivious to the fact that he was in the toils of a den of robbers. Strange to say he had come to think less of the blood upon his own hands since hearing the history of Markham Swamp, and finding himself a prisoner among the horrible fiends.
Having caught five or six dozen speckled trout the party returned to the lair. That evening the chief and Joe returned, the face of each dark and threatening. There was no hilarity, and supper was eaten in silence. Then the robbers smoked for an hour, while the girls repaired torn garments. Nancy did not raise her eyes from her work; but there was in her face a new light, the light of Hope.
CHAPTER VIII.
UNDERGROUND MYSTERIES OF THE SWAMP.
Now that the reader may feel himself upon sure ground as to the facts of this true story, I may state that Roland likewise learnt from Nancy that the gang had a rendezvous in a piece of dense wood known as Brook's Bush, close to the mouth of the Don River. It is also a fact that when the den at Markham was broken up finally, some of the surviving desperadoes took up their permanent abode at Brook's Bush, where they kept an illicit still. Down to fifteen years after the date of my story the community was every now and again startled by tidings of robbery, outrage or murder at the Don; and the last notable act of the gang was the murder of the editor of the Colonist, one Hogan, a member of the legislature. His taking off was done by a woman who struck him upon the head with a stone which she carried in a stocking. [Footnote: Scores of persons living in Toronto now remember this outrage; but anybody can verify the fact by turning to the files of the newspapers of those days.—THE AUTHOR.] The body was then thrown into the Don where it was picked up a short time afterwards.
As for the people of Markham, they lived in constant terror of the miscreants lodged in the bush so near their doors; and they established an efficient staff of special constables for the protection of life and property.
Markham township had been settled about forty-five years before, principally by a number of Dutch families which moved thither from Pennsylvania; but to the rather picturesque little village of the same name, nestling among the pines that fringed the River Rouge, came straggling immigrants or persons grown tired of the solitude and the privations of backwoods life. But to distant portions of the province this thriving village came to be known rather through the terrible reputation of the adjacent swamp than through the thrift, comfort and progress of the people. So much then for the 'dry' but essential facts of this narrative.