“Cutting your trip a bit short this year,—­ain’t you, Boss?” quizzed the Indian guide.

Out from his muffling mackinaw collar the Senior Surgeon parried the question with an amazingly novel sense of embarrassment.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered with studied lightness.  “There are one or two things at home that are bothering me a little.”

“A woman, eh?” said the Indian Guide laconically.

“A woman?” thundered the Senior Surgeon.  “A—­woman?  Oh, ye gods!  No!  It’s wall paper!”

Then suddenly and unexpectedly in the midst of his passionate refutation the Senior Surgeon burst out laughing,—­boisterously, hilariously like a crazy school-boy.  Bluntly from an overhanging ledge of rock the echo of his laugh came mocking back at him.  Down from some unvisioned mountain fastness the echo of that echo came wafting faintly to him.

The Senior Surgeon’s laugh was made of teeth and tongue and palate and a purely convulsive physical impulse.  But the echo’s laugh was a phantasy of mist and dawn and inestimable balsam-scented spaces where little green ferns and little brown beasties and soft-breasted birdlings frolicked eternally in pristine sweetness.

Seven miles further down the lake, at the beginning of the rapids, the Indian Guide spoke again.  Racking the canoe between two rocks,—­paddling, panting, pushing, sweating, the Indian Guide lifted his voice high,—­piercing, above the swirling roar of waters.

“Eh, Boss!” shouted the Indian Guide.  “I ain’t never heard you laugh before!”

Neither man spoke again more than once or twice during the long, strenuous hours that were left to them.

The Indian Guide was very busy in his stolid mind trying to figure out just how many rows of potatoes could be planted fruitfully between his front door and his cow-shed.  I don’t know what the Senior Surgeon was trying to figure out.

It was just four days later from a rolling, musty-cushioned hack that the Senior Surgeon disembarked at his own front gate.

Even though a man likes home no better than he likes—­tea, few men would deny the soothing effect of home at the end of a long fussy railroad journey.  Five o’clock, also, of a late June afternoon is a peculiarly wonderful time to be arriving home,—­especially if that home has a garden around it so that you are thereby not rushed precipitously upon the house itself, as upon a cup without a saucer, but can toy visually with the whole effect before you quench your thirst with the actual draught.

Very, very deliberately, with his clumsy rod-case in one hand, and his heavy grip in the other, the Senior Surgeon started up the long, broad gravel path to the house.  For a man walking as slow as he was, his heart was beating most extraordinarily fast.  He was not accustomed to heart-palpitation.  The symptom worried him a trifle.  Incidentally also his lungs felt strangely stifled with the scent of