“If you go on to Tete Jaune you’re a bigger fool than I was in tryin’ to swim the outfit across the river to-day,” he added.  “Listen!” He leaned toward Aldous, his eyes gleaming.  “In the last six months there’s been forty dead men dragged out of the Frazer between Tete Jaune an’ Fort George.  You know that.  The papers have called ’em accidents—­the ’toll of railroad building.’  Mebby a part of it is.  Mebby a half of them forty died by accident.  The other half didn’t.  They were sent down by Culver Rann and Bill Quade.  Once you go floatin’ down the Frazer there ain’t no questions asked.  Somebody sees you an’ pulls you out—­mebby a Breed or an Indian—­an’ puts you under a little sand a bit later.  If it’s a white man he does likewise.  There ain’t no time to investigate floaters over-particular in the wilderness.  Besides, you git so beat up in the rocks you don’t look like much of anything.  I know, because I worked on the scows three months, an’ helped bury four of ’em.  An’ there wasn’t anything, not even a scrap of paper, in the pockets of two of ’em!  Is that suspicious, or ain’t it?  It don’t pay to talk too much along the Frazer.  Men keep their mouths shut.  But I’ll tell you this:  Culver Rann an’ Bill Quade know a lot.”

“And you think I’ll go in the Frazer?”

“Egzactly.  Quade would rather have you in there than in the Athabasca.  And then——­”

“Well?”

Stevens spat into the bush, and shrugged his shoulders.  “This beautiful lady you’ve taken an interest in will turn up missing, Aldous.  She’ll disappear off the face of the map—­just like Stimson’s wife did.  You remember Stimson?”

“He was found in the Frazer,” said Aldous, gripping the other’s arm in the darkness.

“Egzactly.  An’ that pretty wife of his disappeared a little later.  Up there everybody’s too busy to ask where other people go.  Culver Rann an’ Bill Quade know what happened to Stimson, an’ they know what happened to Stimson’s wife.  You don’t want to go to Tete Jaune.  You don’t want to let her go.  I know what I’m talking about.  Because——­”

There fell a moment’s silence.  Aldous waited.  Stevens spat again, and finished in a whisper: 

“Quade went to Tete Jaune to-night.  He went on a hand-car.  He’s got something he wants to tell Culver Rann that he don’t dare telephone or telegraph.  An’ he wants to get that something to him ahead of to-morrow’s train.  Understand?”

CHAPTER VIII

John Aldous confessed to himself that he did not quite understand, in spite of the effort Stevens had made to impress upon him, the importance of not going to Tete Jaune.  He was bewildered over a number of things, and felt that he needed to be alone for a time to clear his mind.  He left Stevens, promising to return later to share a couple of blankets and a part of his tepee, for he was determined to keep his promise to Joanne, and not return to his own cabin, even though Quade had left Miette.  He followed a moonlit trail along the river to an abandoned surveyors’ camp, knowing that he would meet no one, and that in this direction he would have plenty of unbroken quiet in which to get some sort of order out of the chaotic tangle of events through which he had passed that day.