At four in the morning we gave up and started back, heavy-hearted.  What, therefore, was our surprise to find Tish sitting by the fire in her bathrobe, with a cup of tea in her lap and her feet in a foot-tub of hot water!  Considering all we had gone through and that we had obeyed orders exactly, she was distinctly unjust.  Indeed, at first she quite refused to speak to any of us.

“I do think, Tish,” Aggie said as she stood shivering by the fire, “that you might at least explain where you have been.  We have been going up and down the river for hours, burying you over and over.”

Tish took a sip of tea, but said nothing.

“You said,” I reminded her, “that if there was shooting, we were to start after you at once.  When we heard the shots, we went, of course.”

Tish leaned over and, taking the teakettle from the fire, poured more water into the foot-tub.  Then at last she turned to speak.

“Bring some absorbent cotton and some bandages, Hutchins,” she said.  “I am bleeding from a hundred wounds.  As for you”—­she turned fiercely on Aggie and me—­“the least you could have done was to be here when I returned, exhausted, injured, and weary; but, of course, you were gallivanting round the lake in an upholstered motor boat.”

Here she poured more water into the foot-tub and made it much too hot.  This thawed her rather, and she explained what was wrong.  She was bruised, scratched to the knees, and with a bump the size of an egg on her forehead, where she had run into a tree.

The whole story was very exciting.  It seems she got the green canoe without any difficulty, the spy being sound asleep in his tent; but about that time the wind came up and Tish said she could not make an inch of progress toward our camp.

The chewing gum with which we had repaired our canoe came out at that time and the boat began to fill, Tish being unable to sit over the leak and paddle at the same time.  So, at last, she gave up and made for the mainland.

“The shooting,” Tish said with difficulty, “was by men from the Indian camp firing at me.  I landed below the camp, and was making my way as best I could through the woods when they heard me moving.  I believe they thought it was a bear.”

I think Tish was more afraid of the Indians, in spite of their sixty-three steel engravings and the rest of it, than she pretended, though she said she would have made herself known, but at that moment she fell over a fallen tree and for fifteen minutes was unable to speak a word.  When at last she rose the excitement was over and they had gone back to their camp.

“Anyhow,” she finished, “the green canoe is hidden a couple of miles down the river, and I guess Mr. McDonald is safe for a time.  Lizzie, you can take a bath to-morrow safely.”

Tish sat up most of the rest of the night composing a letter to the authorities of the town, telling them of Mr. McDonald and enclosing careful copies of the incriminating documents she had found.