portages and portage his canoe afterwards I guess it gets heavy enough."
Dick turned away with a grunt. He did not like men who looked out for trouble. Besides, it was so very true that he did not know where he was going. Neither in spirit nor in body did he know. But he was very sure of one thing. Before the trail was ended he would burst through that crust which sheltered Tempest, even if Tempest killed him for it.
The sun was yet high, though Tempest's watch said half-past six, when the three canoes dropped away from Fort Resolution, threading through the big and little channels that harry the many island shores. The sun laid its broad gold on their faces or on their neck-napes as they wound right and left, with the birds calling past them from island to island and all the warm wet scents of trees and earth blowing fresh in their nostrils; there was enough wind to keep the mosquitoes off, and the canoes cut their way strongly with the dipping paddles sending light-flashes far over the streaming water.
Leaf-of-the-woods, crouched with her children in a little crazy dug-out, and paddling heavily back to her home on a distant island, looked up as the canoes swept by, with the sun glinting on tunic-buttons and badges, and making ruddy the firm-lipped, keen-eyed faces. Exactly what Tempest had done for her she could not comprehend; but she understood that in some mysterious way he had assured those coveted five dollars to the sleeping child at her feet. She halted the paddle in her dusky, dirty little hands; staring, round-eyed and unemotional. Tempest smiled as he went by. He was kneeling bare-headed, with the wind in his thick chestnut hair and his strong neck stiffened for the thrust and swing of the paddle. Leaf-of-the-woods gave no response. She did not think about it. Tempest was something so utterly alien to her; so completely outside her life and her comprehension. He scarcely seemed a man among men to Leaf-of-the-woods. He was more like some undefined force, as all the white men who trod and looked as he did were. She watched him pass with a kind of indifference, and when the islands hid him, she took up her paddle again and worked her stolid way home.
