What if he should see them, deep in the wet grass, filing across the open marsh!  How many shots would be needed to bring his war to a triumphant end?  There were no thickets in which they might find shelter:  hidden himself, they could not return his fire.  Before they could break and run to cover he could destroy them all!

Should they cross the narrow neck of the marsh, higher up, he would have every chance to see them on the lake shore.  The site was good from the point of health and comfort—­high enough to escape the worst of the insect pests, close to fresh water, plenty of fuel, and within a few hundred yards of a lake that simply swarmed with fish and waterfowl.

Still following a narrow, racing trout stream that flowed into the lake they advanced a short distance farther, clear to the base of a rock wall.  And all at once Beatrice, walking in front, drew up with a gasp.

She stood at the edge of a little glade, perhaps thirty yards across, laying at the base of the cliff.  The creek flowed through it, the grass was green and rich, beloved by the antlered herds that came to graze, the tall spruce shaded it on three sides.  But it was not these things that caught the girl’s eye.  Just at the edge of a glade a dark hole yawned in the face of the cliff.

In an instant more they were beside it, gazing into its depths.  It was a natural cavern with rock walls and a clean floor of sand—­a roomy place, and yet a perfect stronghold against either mortal enemies or the powers of wind and rain.

“It’s home,” the man said simply.

XXVI

Ben and Beatrice went together back to the canoe, and in two trips they carried the supplies to the cave.  By instinct a housekeeper, Beatrice showed him where to stow the various supplies, what part of the cave was to be used for provisions, where their cots would be laid, and where to erect the cooking rack.  Shadows had fallen over the land before they finished the work.

Tired from the hard tramp, yet sustained by a vague excitement neither of them could name or trace, they began to prepare for the night.  Ben cut boughs as before, placing Beatrice’s bed within the portals of the cave and his own on the grass outside.  He cut fuel and made his fire:  Beatrice prepared the evening meal.

The flesh of the cub-bear they had procured that morning would have to serve them to-night; but more delicious meat could be procured to-morrow.  Ben knew that the white-maned caribou fed in the high park lands.  Beatrice made biscuits and brewed tea; and they ate the simple food in the firelight.  Already the darkness was pressing close upon them, tremulous, vaguely sinister, inscrutably mysterious.

They had talked gayly at first; but they grew silent as the fire burned down to coals.  A great preoccupation seemed to hold them both.  When one spoke the other started, and word did not immediately come in answer.  Beatrice’s despair was not nearly so dominating to-night; and Ben harbored a secret excitement that was almost happiness.