"Not when you're near ter keep an eye on me," returned Rube, with confidence. "Course you'll help me t' git back inter the canoe. 'Tain't the same's mountin' a pony."
"Well, no," smiled Kiddie. "You'll mount over her head or her tail. She'll roll over, sure, if you try ter get astride her by the middle."
Rube paddled out into the lake until he was told to stop. He shipped his paddle, and looked round in time to see Kiddie's beautiful muscular figure poised ready to dive from the high peak.
With an adroit movement, Kiddie leapt into the air and, turning, cut the water as cleanly as an arrow, making very little splash. Rube waited so long for him to reappear that it seemed almost that some accident had happened to him. But at length he came up in a quite unexpected place, swimming back to the canoe at a pace that was astonishing. Thereafter he devoted himself to giving lessons to Rube in swimming and diving and re-entering the frail canoe.
"Quite enough for one morning," he said, before Rube had been in the water nearly as long as he wished. "We'll get back to camp now and have a cracker and a drink of hot tea. Then we'll visit the traps, and you c'n get breakfast ready while I shave. I guess we may's well have eggs and bacon, eh?"
"Might have some o' that thar honey as well," suggested Rube.
"All right," Kiddie agreed. "But you'll be havin' the bees foolin' around while we're at breakfast, if you're not careful. What you goin' ter smoke 'em out with?"
"Sulphur," Rube answered promptly. "I got a chunk in me pocket; been usin' it t' put in my bear cub's drinkin' water."
Rube was in more haste than he need have been to disturb the bees. Kiddie, while waiting for his shaving water to heat, was making a toasting fork of a stick with a forked end for cooking the bacon. He had seen Rube carry away a flat slab of stone with crushed sulphur on it, and had watched Rube lighting the sulphur and shoving the slab within the hollow of the tree, as he might shove a dish into an oven.
Suddenly there was a cry of alarm.