“That may do on the ocean, Master Cap,” put in Pathfinder, “but it would not do here.  Water leaves no trail, and a Mingo and a Frenchman are a match for the devil in a pursuit.”

“Who wants a trail when the chase can be seen from the deck, as Jasper here said was the case with this canoe? and it mattered nothing if there were twenty of your Mingos and Frenchmen, with a good British-built bottom in their wake.  I’ll engage, Master Eau-douce, had you given me a call that said Tuesday morning, that we should have overhauled the blackguards.”

“I daresay, Master Cap, that the advice of as old a seaman as you might have done no harm to as young a sailor as myself, but it is a long and a hopeless chase that has a bark canoe in it.”

“You would have had only to press it hard, to drive it ashore.”

“Ashore, master Cap!  You do not understand our lake navigation at all, if you suppose it an easy matter to force a bark canoe ashore.  As soon as they find themselves pressed, these bubbles paddle right into the wind’s eye, and before you know it, you find yourself a mile or two dead under their lee.”

“You don’t wish me to believe, Master Jasper, that any one is so heedless of drowning as to put off into this lake in one of them eggshells when there is any wind?”

“I have often crossed Ontario in a bark canoe, even when there has been a good deal of sea on.  Well managed, they are the driest boats of which we have any knowledge.”

Cap now led his brother-in-law and Pathfinder aside, when he assured him that the admission of Jasper concerning the spies was “a circumstance,” and “a strong circumstance,” and as such it deserved his deliberate investigation; while his account of the canoes was so improbable as to wear the appearance of brow-beating the listeners.  Jasper spoke confidently of the character of the two individuals who had landed, and this Cap deemed pretty strong proof that he knew more about them than was to be gathered from a mere trail.  As for moccasins, he said that they were worn in that part of the world by white men as well as by Indians; he had purchased a pair himself; and boots, it was notorious, did not particularly make a soldier.  Although much of this logic was thrown away on the Sergeant, still it produced some effect.  He thought it a little singular himself, that there should have been spies detected so near the fort and he know nothing of it; nor did he believe that this was a branch of knowledge that fell particularly within the sphere of Jasper.  It was true that the Scud had, once or twice, been sent across the lake to land men of this character, or to bring them off; but then the part played by Jasper, to his own certain knowledge, was very secondary, the master of the cutter remaining as ignorant as any one else of the purport of the visits of those whom he had carried to and fro; nor did he see why he alone, of all present, should know anything of the late visit.