Page:Hendryx--Connie Morgan with the Mounted.djvu/192

174 around to the dog corral, and ten minutes later, Dan McKeever paused at the sound of a small voice and peered over into the corral where the boy sat on the ground, surrounded by his ten great malamutes. "That's the trouble with being just a boy," Connie was explaining to McDougall's big leader, "here's Dan and Rickey and even that sawed-off Peters got some real work to do. And I got to go off and count a lot of greasy Indians! Well," he consoled himself, "that's better than no assignment at all, like some of 'em got. You bet, I'll hike up that river and I'll count those Indians the best they ever was counted—and don't you forget it!" Whereupon he fell to playfully thumping McDougall's great leader with both fists, and Dan McKeever passed on with a grin.

Counting the Indians on the upper McQuesten was not a very strenuous job and twenty days after their arrival upon the farther reaches of the river, Connie Morgan and Ick Far began the return journey. The McQuesten is a quick- water river, and as the canoe shot swiftly around the bend on the second day of the return trip, Connie, who was in the bow, saw at the edge of the scrub upon a long bar, a one-man camp where no camp had been