“She’s going.”

There was a smashing and snapping.  The huge trunk rolled a little, rent, and swept away, and Seaforth reeling shorewards sat down with bleeding hands in the ashes, laughing foolishly, until Okanagan stooped and smote his shoulder.

“Get up,” he said.  “It’s time we were going.”

There was not light enough to see by, and they had eaten nothing during all those hours of heroic toil, but Seaforth seemed to realize that the issue lay beyond them now, and it did not matter greatly what they did or failed to do.  He was also consumed by a desire to escape from that horrible place of shadow, and striking the tent in clumsy haste they launched the canoe.  After that he remembered little, though he had a hazy recollection of stopping somewhere and helping Tom to make a fire, for there was wood in abundance everywhere.  Whether he ate anything he did not know, but all day the canoe slid on comparatively smoothly, and they toiled at the paddle until hands and arms seemed to move of their own volition.  Seaforth felt that he would gladly have lain down and frozen, but an influence which had apparently nothing to do with his will constrained him to labour on.

At last, when the stars were shining and the moon hung red in a broader strip of sky, the curious sustaining animus seemed to desert him, and he lurched forward with a little gasp, while the paddle almost slipped from his stiffened fingers.

“Hold up,” said Okanagan.  “Stream’s running slow, and the hills are opening there.  I’m not sure that we’re not close on the Somasco valley.”

Seaforth made a last effort, but his fingers lost their grasp, and when he slipped forward again his paddle slid away behind them.  Then he groaned a little, and lay still in the bottom of the canoe.  The next thing he was clearly conscious of was the ringing of a rifle and he raised himself as the woods flung back the sound.  They seemed some distance from him now, and the moon shone down on a broadening strip of water.  Again the rifle flashed, and he wondered vacantly whether the twinkle that perplexed his hazy sight could be lights that blinked at them.

“Where have we got to, Tom?” he said.

Okanagan laughed softly.  “Tolerably close on Somasco,” he said.  “I think they’ve heard us at the mill.”

Then as Seaforth listened, a shout came ringing across the glinting space before them that seemed curiously still.  “Hold on.  We’re coming.  Is that you and the others, Tom?”

Okanagan laughed again, and the canoe stopped amidst the ice when the paddle fell from his hand.

“It’s a good deal less of us than there was when we started out,” he said.

CHAPTER XXII

MISS DERINGHAM DECIDES