“Yes; he’s along,” Walter acknowledged carelessly. “He killed a moose last night, you know.”
The inference was that no gentleman receives company the first day after killing a moose. The boys looked mystified, but were full of polite interest.
“He stayed back then? He didn’t come down with you?” Buck questioned.
I watched Walter, for this was a crisis. He simply had to decide now where Bob was: whether a few rods back or still in camp on Lac à la Poêle; and whichever way he decided Bob was likely to plan otherwise. It was a crucial moment. And with that, out of the forest dashed the long figure of Blanc, his trousers suspended up under his arms, his belt six inches lower, the red stripes of his wool socks giving a flippant expression to his earnest personality. Blanc was not clever, and he looked anxious as he came into the midst of us.
“M’sieur,” he opened fire; “it is from M’sieur Bob.”
“Oui, you may tell me what he said,” Walter allowed. I saw him bite his lip as if the strain was great. The three lads listened.
“I do not comprehend—me, M’sieur,” Blanc went on, “but M’sieur Bob instructed me to say to M’sieur that M’sieur should say to the new messieurs—” He glanced about the circle mildly, including them, and drew his brow together with an unhappy expression. But he spoke with a pretty distinctness. “That M’sieur should say to the new messieurs that he—M’sieur Bob—had unfortunately returned to Lac Lumière by another route. M’sieur is to say that M’sieur Bob did not know of the arrival of the three new messieurs. M’sieur is by no means to let the new messieurs learn that he—M’sieur Bob—is at present up the river, one-half mile of distance from here on the portage.”
Between Bob’s extreme duplicity and Blanc’s extreme frankness even Walter and I could not make out the plot for a moment. There is no other route to Lac Lumière, but it simultaneously came to us that Bob meant to make a forced march and pass us back in the woods, so reaching the lake before us. There he would probably shout till the guides left in camp heard him and paddled over for him, and once landed at the base of reserves he could await his friends clothed properly. It was a well-planned flank movement—Bob seemed a young Napoleon, but Blanc as his aide-de-camp was a complete Waterloo.
With that Blanc veered about and melted, the way he had come, into the forest. I looked at Walter, and saw that even a lawyer did not know any hole out of this corner, and then suddenly the end came in a way not expected.
The hero Buck has, like many heroes, an eye for the fair sex. While he waited for the riddle to be solved, taking it for granted easily that Bob would turn up some time and that “the guide chap was loony”—so he told me later—the memory of another mystery came back to him, the mystery of an unknown lady.