"Nothing the matter, I hope, Miss Yardely?"
"No, thank you," she answered with a little attempt to laugh; "but one can't sing, you know, with mosquitoes and other winged beasts popping into one's mouth."
"They are rather a nuisance," he agreed and plodded on.
Packing one's worldly possessions through the pathless wilderness is a slow, grinding misery. The lightest pack soon becomes a burden. At the beginning of a march it may seem a mere nothing, in an hour it is an oppression; in three a millstone is a feather compared with it; and before night the inexperienced packer feels that, like Atlas, he bears the world upon his shoulders. It was therefore little wonder that Helen Yardely ceased to sing after they had marched but a very little way; and indeed the trail, apart from the apparently growing weight of the pack, was not favourable to song. There was no sort of path whatever after they had left the river bank; nothing but the primeval forest, with an undergrowth that was so dense that the branches of one bush were often interwoven with its neighbours. Through this they had to force their way, head down, hands and clothes suffering badly in the process. Then would come a patch of Jack-pine, where trees seven to ten feet high grew in such profusion that it was well-nigh impossible to find a passage between them; and on the heels of this would follow a stretch of muskeg, quaking underfoot, and full of boggy traps for the unwary. In the larger timber also, the deadfalls presented an immense difficulty. Trees, with their span of life exhausted, year after year, had dropped where they stood, and dragging others down in their fall, cumbered the ground in all directions, sometimes presenting tangled barriers which it was necessary to climb over, a method not unaccompanied by danger, since in the criss-cross of the branches and trunks a fall would almost inevitably have meant a broken limb.
The ground they travelled over was uneven, intersected here and there by gullies, which were only to be skirted by great expense of time and energy, and the crossing of which was sometimes dangerous, but had perforce to be accomplished, and by noon, when they reached the bank of a small stream, the girl was exhausted and her face wore a strained look. Stane saw it, and halting, took off his pack.
"Time for grub," he said.
Then unstrapping his pack he stretched a blanket on the sloping ground. The girl watched him with interest.
"Why——" she began, only to be promptly interrupted.
"For you," he explained briefly. "Lie down and relax your limbs. Pull this other blanket over you, then you won't chill."
"But I want to help," she protested. "I don't like to feel that you are working and I——"