He said something further, a few quick sentences in the French patois of the northern half-breeds, at which both he and his fellow-voyageur in the stern laughed.  Their gayety stirred no response from the midship passenger.  If anything, he frowned.  He was a serious-minded young man, and he did not understand French.  He had a faint suspicion that his convoy did not take him as seriously as he wished.  Whether their talk was badinage or profanity or purely casual, he could not say.  In the first stages of their journey together, on the upper reaches of the river, Mike Breyette and Donald MacDonald had, after the normal habit of their kind, greeted the several contingencies and minor mishaps such a journey involved with plaintive oaths in broken English.  Mr. Wesley Thompson, projected into an unfamiliar environment and among a—­to him—­strange manner of men, took up his evangelistic cudgel and administered shocked reproof.  It was, in a way, practice for the tasks the Methodist Board of Home Missions had appointed him to perform.  But if he failed to convict these two of sin, he convinced them of discourtesy.  Even a rude voyageur has his code of manners.  Thereafter they invariably swore in French.

They bore on in a northerly direction, keeping not too far from the lake shore, lest the combination of a sudden squall and a heavy-loaded canoe should bring disaster.  When Mike Breyette’s “two-tree” hour was run Mr. Thompson stepped from the canoe to the sloping, sun-blistered beach before Fort Pachugan, and if he did not openly offer thanks to his Maker that he stood once more upon solid ground he at least experienced profound relief.

For many days he had occupied that midship position with ill-concealed misgivings.  The largest bodies of water he had been on intimate terms with heretofore had been contained within the dimensions of a bathtub.  He could not swim.  No matter that his faith in an all-wise Providence was strong he could not forbear inward tremors at the certain knowledge that only a scant quarter-inch of frail wood and canvas stood between him and a watery grave.  He regarded a canoe with distrust.  Nor could he understand the careless confidence with which his guides embarked in so captious a craft upon the swirling bosom of that wide, swift stream they had followed from Athabasca Landing down to the lake of the same name.  To Thompson—­if he had been capable of analyzing his sensations and transmuting them into words—­the river seemed inexplicably sinister, a turbid monster writhing over polished boulders, fuming here and there over rapids, snarling a constant menace under the canoe’s prow.

It did not comfort him to know that he was in the hands of two capable rivermen, tried and proven in bad water, proud of their skill with the paddle.  Could he have done so the reverend young man would gladly have walked after the first day in their company.  But since that was out of the question, he took his seat in the canoe each morning and faced each stretch of troubled water with an inward prayer.