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Rh confidence in his ability successfully to repeat the adventure—via a route of his own selection.

Eight days out of London, a second-class passenger newly landed from one of the C.-P. steamships, he walked the streets of Quebec, and dropped out of sight between dark and dawn, to turn up in the Canadian hamlet of Baie St. Paul, apparently a tenderfoot American woods-traveller chaperoned by a taciturn Indian guide.

Crossing the St. Lawrence by night, the two struck off into the hinterland of the Notre Dame range, followed the Riviere Quelle to its headwaters, and then crossed the Maine border.

On the second noon thereafter, trail-worn and weary, the two paused on a ridge-pole of the wilderness up back of the Allagash country, and made their midday meal in a silence which, if normal in the Indian, was one of deep misgiving on Alan's part.

Continually his gaze questioned the northern skies that lowered portentously, foul with the smoke of a county-wide conflagration that threatened unless soon checked to lay waste all northern Maine bone-dry with drought.

And the fires were making southward far faster than man might hope to travel through that grim and stubborn land. Even as he stared, Alan saw fresh columns of dun-coloured smoke spring up as