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180 ashore, seeking information. He found reindeer moss and willows and pines bent with the wind. He found a dead beaver, and white ash where a camp had been. Then he came back.

"Best cache the boat and stay ashore," he said. "Someone's bound to turn up before long."

Forsyth looked round with dubious eyes. The very air of the place smelt of something given over to the grey gull and the musk-rat.

"What would you suppose they want to come here for?" he asked.

"How should I know? Fond du Lac Indians in it, likely."

Forsyth made doubtful noises in his throat and flung himself down in the soft warm moss. "I guess" he began, and slept with the words in his mouth yet.

Honoré was already sleeping, unrestrained and peaceful. But Dick had never been more fully awake in all his life. He was strung up to tension that would give him no rest until this business was put through, and he smoked two pipes scarce knowing it, clenched grimly in his thoughts. With the third he began to grow restless. For in all that wide far sweep of blue there lay no smudge of smoke; in all the green silence behind there came no sound of life; no straggling camp of Indians to set their tepees up and to make their fires, even as Honoré had done, against the mosquito army. He walked and watched, but he did not doubt, and it was Forsyth who flung the first bomb over the supper at a later hour.

"Where did you get your information?" he demanded suddenly of Dick.

"From a reliable source," said Dick curtly.

"You can bank on that?"

"Certainly."

Forsyth wrinkled his eyes up, drawing under lee of the smoke.

"They say you've never been caught," he remarked. "Otherwise I'd go bail as this were a put-up job. 'Taint the first time I've experienced such things. Robison's about up to all the tricks there are."

"The information did not come through Robison."