Dick was afoot after a few hours’ sleep.  He aroused Sam and went about the preparation of breakfast.  May-may-gwan attempted to help, but both she and her efforts were disregarded.  She brought wood, but Dick rustled a supply just the same, paying no attention to the girl’s little pile; she put on fresh fuel, but Dick, without impatience,—­indeed, as though he were merely rearranging the fire,—­contrived to undo her work; she brought to hand the utensils, but Dick, in searching for them, always looked where they had originally been placed.  His object seemed not so much to thwart the girl as to ignore her.  When breakfast was ready he divided it into two portions, one of which he ate.  After the meal he washed the few dishes.  Once he took a cup from the girl’s hand as she was drying it, much as he would have taken it from the top of a stump.  He then proceeded to clean it as though it had just been used.

May-may-gwan made no sign that she noticed these things.  After a little she helped Sam roll the blankets, strike the shelter, construct the packs.  Here her assistance was accepted, though Sam did not address her.  After a few moments the start was made.

The first few hours were spent as before, wading the stream.  As she could do nothing in the water, May-may-gwan kept to the woods, walking stolidly onward, her face to the front, expressionless, hiding whatever pain she may have felt.  This side of noon, however, the travellers came to a cataract falling over a fifty-foot ledge into a long, cliff-bordered pool.

It became necessary to portage.  The hill pinched down steep and close.  There existed no trails.  Dick took the little camp axe to find a way.  He clambered up one after the other three ravines—­grown with brush and heavy ferns, damp with a trickle of water,—­always to be stopped near the summit by a blank wall impossible to scale.  At length he found a passage he thought might be practicable.  Thereupon he cut a canoe trail back to the water-side.

In clearing this trail his attention turned to making room for a canoe on a man’s back.  Therefore the footing he bothered with not at all.  Saplings he clipped down by bending them with the left hand, and striking at the strained fibres where they bowed.  A single blow would thus fell treelets of some size.  When he had finished his work there resulted a winding, cylindrical hole in the forest growth some three feet from the ground.  Through this cylinder the canoe would be passed while its bearer picked a practised way among slippery rocks, old stubs, new sapling stumps, and undergrowth below.  Men who might, in later years, wish to follow this Indian trail, would look not for footprints but for waist-high indications of the axe.

When the canoe had been carried to the top of the bluff that marked the water-fall, it was relaunched in a pool.  In the meantime May-may-gwan, who had at last found a use for her willingness, carried the packs.  Dick re-embarked.  His companion perceived that he intended to shove off as soon as the other should have taken his place.  Sam frustrated that, however, by holding fast to the gunwale.  May-may-gwan stepped in amidships, with a half-deprecating glance at the young man’s inscrutable back.  At the end of the brief paddling the upper pool allowed them, she was first ashore.