“There are lots of things I can’t do, and it’s not your fault that you were raised back in the old country, where you have other folks to put the patches on to you.”

“No,” said Seaforth, smiling.  “Still, he is my partner, you see.  Now I want to know what we are going to do with him.”

Okanagan’s smile was just perceptible as he held up a ragged piece of lead, but Seaforth saw that he understood all the speech implied, though he made no reference to it,

“There’s half the trouble gone,” he said.  “The rest of it went straight through the bone, and I kind of fancy smashed it up considerable.”

“Will the pieces knit as they were before?” said Seaforth very anxiously, and for a moment or two Okanagan did not answer him.

“That,” he said very slowly, “is what I don’t quite know.  One of them bones is a rocker, and she swings on the other.  That one’s cut, but I don’t think it’s smashed right through.  Now if it goes as well as the other, it’s quite possible Harry will limp ever after.”

Seaforth stood up with a little shiver.  “Good Lord.  Harry of all men a cripple!  Tom, you must do something.”

Okanagan slowly shook his head.  “I’ve done my best now,” he said.  “We can get him down to Somasco and a live doctor up from Vancouver as soon as we can, and that’s about all.  There’s no time to lose.  We’ll start to-morrow.”

Seaforth cast one glance at the still figure and grey face amidst the blankets, and then clenched his hands as he blundered out of the tent.  A white flake fell upon his face, another on his hands, and he shivered again as he glanced at the forest.  It was very evident that much depended upon their speed, and down between the sombre pines came the sliding snow.

CHAPTER XXI

OKANAGAN’S ROAD

The great cedar-boughs above the river bent beneath their load, and the scanty light was dimmed by sliding snow, when Seaforth and his comrade stood panting and white all over by the last portage.  Okanagan by dint of laborious searching had found the canoe jammed between two boulders with her side crushed in, and had spent a day repairing her with a flattened out meat-can and strips of deerskin.  The craft had notwithstanding this leaked considerably, but they made shift to descend the river in her, and now if they could accomplish the last big portage hoped by toiling strenuously to make the mouth of the canon by nightfall.

What they would do when they reached it neither of them knew, but they were too cold and jaded to concern themselves with more than the question how they were to convey their comrade over the boulders and through the thickets which divided them from the next stretch of comparatively untroubled water just then.  They had spent most of the day dragging the canoe round the rapid which roared down the hollow in a wild tumult of froth, lifting her with levers from rock to rock, and now and then sliding with her down a declivity, but that was a mode of progression clearly unsuited to an injured man.