And Frona answered, “Yes; our hearts would have surely broken.”

Life, and the pleasant camp-fire, and the quiet rest in the noonday shade, came back to Tommy as the shore drew near, and more than all, blessed Toronto, its houses that never moved, and its jostling streets.  Each time his head sank forward and he reached out and clutched the water with his paddle, the streets enlarged, as though gazing through a telescope and adjusting to a nearer focus.  And each time the paddle drove clear and his head was raised, the island bounded forward.  His head sank, and the streets were of the size of life; it raised, and Jacob Welse and the two men stood on the bank three lengths away.

“Dinna I tell ye!” he shouted to them, triumphantly.

But Frona jerked the canoe parallel with the bank, and he found himself gazing at the long up-stream stretch.  He arrested a stroke midway, and his paddle clattered in the bottom.

“Pick it up!” Corliss’s voice was sharp and relentless.

“I’ll do naething o’ the kind.”  He turned a rebellious face on his tormentor, and ground his teeth in anger and disappointment.

The canoe was drifting down with the current, and Frona merely held it in place.  Corliss crawled forward on his knees.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Tommy,” he said in a low, tense voice, “so . . . well, just pick it up, that’s a good fellow.”

“I’ll no.”

“Then I shall kill you,” Corliss went on, in the same calm, passionless way, at the same time drawing his hunting-knife from its sheath.

“And if I dinna?” the Scotsman queried stoutly, though cowering away.

Corliss pressed gently with the knife.  The point of the steel entered Tommy’s back just where the heart should be, passed slowly through the shirt, and bit into the skin.  Nor did it stop there; neither did it quicken, but just as slowly held on its way.  He shrank back, quivering.

“There! there! man!  Pit it oop!” he shrieked.  “I maun gie in!”

Frona’s face was quite pale, but her eyes were hard, brilliantly hard, and she nodded approval.

“We’re going to try this side, and shoot across from above,” she called to her father.  “What?  I can’t hear.  Tommy?  Oh, his heart’s weak.  Nothing serious.”  She saluted with her paddle.  “We’ll be back in no time, father mine.  In no time.”

Stewart River was wide open, and they ascended it a quarter of a mile before they shot its mouth and continued up the Yukon.  But when they were well abreast of the man on the opposite bank a new obstacle faced them.  A mile above, a wreck of an island clung desperately to the river bed.  Its tail dwindled to a sand-spit which bisected the river as far down as the impassable bluffs.  Further, a few hundred thousand tons of ice had grounded upon the spit and upreared a glittering ridge.

“We’ll have to portage,” Corliss said, as Frona turned the canoe from the bank.