It was mid-afternoon the following day before the wind and rain had so far subsided as to permit Eli to turn the point and proceed upon his journey.  Even then, with all his effort, the progress he made against the north-west breeze was so slow that it was not until the following forenoon that he reached The Jug.  Thomas saw him coming and was on the jetty to welcome him.

“How be you, Eli?” Thomas greeted.  “I’m wonderful glad to see you.  Come right up and have a cup o’ tea.”

“How be you, Thomas?  Is Injun Jake here?”

“He were here,” said Thomas, “but he only stops one day to help me get the outfit ready and then he goes on in his canoe to hunt bear up the Nascaupee River whilst he waits there for me to go to the Seal Lake trails.  You want to see he?”

“Aye, and I’m goin’ to see whatever!”

While Eli had a snack to eat and a cup of tea with Thomas and Margaret he told Thomas of Indian Jake’s call upon his father, of the shooting and of the robbery which followed.

“Injun Jake turns back after leavin’ and shoots Pop and takes the silver,” he concluded, “and I’m goin’ to get the silver whatever, even if I has to shoot Injun Jake to get un!”

“Is you sure, now, ’twere Injun Jake does un?” asked Thomas, unwilling to believe his friend and partner capable of such treachery.  By disposition Thomas was naturally cautious of passing judgment or of accusing anyone of misdeed without conclusive proof.

“There’s no doubtin’ that!” insisted Eli.  “There was nobody else to do un.  ’Twere Injun Jake.”

A shift of wind to the southward assisted Eli on his way.  Early that evening he reached the Hudson’s Bay Company’s post, twenty miles west of The Jug.  Here he stopped for supper and learned from Zeke Hodge, the Post servant, that Indian Jake had passed up Grand Lake in his canoe two days before.  Zeke expressed doubt as to Eli’s finding the half-breed at the Nascaupee River.  He stated it as his opinion that if Indian Jake were guilty of the crime, as he had no doubt, he was planning an escape and had in all probability immediately plunged into the interior, in which case he was already hopelessly beyond pursuit and had fled the Bay country for good and all.  Like Eli, Zeke convicted the half-breed at once.

The Eskimo Bay Post of the Hudson’s Bay Company is the last inhabited dwelling as the traveller enters the wilderness; he might go on and on for a thousand miles to Hudson Bay and in the whole vast expanse of distance no other human habitation will he find.  His camps will be pitched in the depths of forests or on desolate, naked barrens; and always, in forests or on barrens, he will hear the rush and roar of mighty rivers or the lapping waves of wide, far-reaching lakes.  The timber wolf will startle him from sleep in the dead of night with its long, weird howl, rising and falling in dismal cadence, or the silence will be broken perchance by the wild, uncanny laugh of the loon falling upon the darkness as a token of ill omen, but in all the vast land he will hear no human voice and he will find no human companionship.