An hour later they bid goodbye to Malcolm Mackenzie and wished him speedy recovery from his burns. The canoe lay ready packed with provisions at the landing when they arrived there. Toma was starting to push off. Dick and Sandy hopped in, and Toma sprang lightly into the bow.
“Now for Fort Dunwoody,” Dick breathed a sigh of relief.
“If I wasn’t an optimist,” Sandy added, “I’d say we aren’t there yet by a long shot.”
Toma silently sculled the craft into the center of the river, and they were once more floating down the stream. The boys marveled at Toma’s deftness with the paddle, though they themselves were experts. The young Indian seemed able to make the canoe fly with his quick, powerful strokes.
A half hour of paddling and the roofs of Mackenzie’s Landing had disappeared in the haze of the morning, and once more the walls of the silent spruce forest closed in on either side of them.
Late that night they camped some twenty miles from the trading post, in a little clearing at the river’s edge. Toma mentioned “bear sign,” and so they hung up their flour and bacon on a tree bough for fear a bear might get it.
Sandy kept first watch while Toma and Dick slept.
It was a dark night. Only the stars were out, and when the fire died down Sandy scarcely could see a dozen paces from the camp. Occasionally he glanced into the shadows, listening to the mysterious sounds of the forest, and starting up at each crackle of a twig or rustle of undergrowth.
Sandy wondered if the men on their trail had been thrown off, and imagined what he would do if they would suddenly attack. As he thought of the dangers threatening Dick and him, his hand tightened on his rifle.
It was nearly eleven o’clock, the time he was to call Toma for the second watch, when Sandy became conscious of some sinister presence. Before he really saw or heard anything, he shivered and looked fearfully about into the gloom of the forest.