Wentworth flushed hot at the grin that accompanied the words.

“To hell with McNabb—­and you, too!” he cried angrily, and carrying the canoe into the water, he placed his pack in it.  When he returned for a paddle, Downey was gone, and stepping into the canoe, he pushed it out into the lake.  “Of course, he’d have to show up, damn him!” he muttered as he propelled the light craft southward with swift strokes of the paddle.  “And now if Orcutt should show up within the next day or two, Downey will know just where to follow, and even with a two days’ start, I doubt if I could keep ahead of him.  They say he’s a devil on the trail.  But I’ll fool him.  I’ll leave the canoe at the end of the lake, and instead of striking on down the river I’ll hit out overland.  Once I get to the railway, they can all go to hell!”

The mistake Wentworth made on the trail when he first came into the North was not so much the insisting upon bringing in his trunk, nor his refusal to carry a pack; it was in striking Alex Thumb with the dog-whip when he refused to pull the outfit in the face of a blizzard.  Thumb’s reputation as a “bad Injun” was well founded.  The son of a hot-tempered French trader and a Cree mother, his early life had been a succession of merciless beatings.  At the age of fourteen he killed his father with a blow from an ice chisel, and thereafter served ten years of an indeterminate sentence, during the course of which the unmerciful beatings were administered for each infraction of reformatory rules, until in his heart was born a sullen hatred of all white men and an abysmal hatred of the lash.  When Wentworth struck, his doom was sealed, but as Murchison said, Alex Thumb was canny.  He had no mind to serve another term in prison.

All through the spring and summer he trailed the engineer, waiting with the patience that is the heritage of the wilderness dweller for the time and the place to strike and avoid suspicion.  And as time drew on the half-breed’s hatred against all white men seemed to concentrate into a mighty rage against this one white man.  There had been times when he could have killed him from afar.  More than once on the trail Wentworth unconsciously stood with the sights of Alex Thumb’s rifle trained upon his head, or his heart.  But such was his hatred that Thumb always stayed the finger that crooked upon the trigger—­and bided his time.

Thus it was that half an hour after Wentworth pushed out into the lake another canoe shot out from the shore and fell in behind, its lone occupant, paddling noiselessly, easily kept just within sight of the fleeing man.  When daylight broadened Wentworth landed upon a sandy point and ate breakfast.  Upon another point, a mile to the rear, Alex Thumb lay on his belly and chewed jerked meat as his smouldering black eyes regarded gloatingly the man in the distance.

Gods Lake is nearly fifty miles in its north and south reach, and all day Wentworth paddled southward, holding well to the western shore.