They shall cross the silent waters
By a trail that is wild and far.
To the place of the lonely lodges
Under a lonely star.
La Longue Traverse.
“Bob, is this Lake Lemaire?”
Bob Lemaire, leaning against a wind-twisted tamarack on the ridge above the portage, looked long and very long at the desolate country spread out beneath them. Then he looked at a map, drawn on parchment in faded ink, which he had just unfolded from a waterproof case. “I can’t identify it,” he confessed at last, “but I think—”
“If you say another word,” groaned Barrett, “about the reliability of your grandfather, I—I’ll heave rocks at you.” Lemaire smiled slowly, and the smile transfigured his lean, serious face; he folded the map and replaced it in the little case “Well,” he answered, comfortingly, “we can’t mistake P’tite Babiche, anyway, when we come to it.”
“If the thing exists. . . Oh, I know your grandfather said he found it, and stuck it on his map. But no one else has ever found it since.”
“No one else,” said Lemaire, quietly, “has been so far west from the Gran’ Babiche.”