It was after midnight when he went to bed, and he was up with the early dawn.  With the first break of day the bateau men were preparing their breakfast.  David was glad.  He was eager for the day’s work to begin, and in that eagerness he pounded on the door and called out to Joe Clamart that he was ready for his breakfast with the rest of them, but that he wanted only hot coffee to go with what Black Roger had brought to him in the basket.

That afternoon the bateau passed Fort McMurray, and before the sun was well down in the west Carrigan saw the green slopes of Thickwood Hills and the rising peaks of Birch Mountains.  He laughed outright as he thought of Corporal Anderson and Constable Frazer at Fort McMurray, whose chief duty was to watch the big waterway.  How their eyes would pop if they could see through the padlocked door of his prison!  But he had no inclination to be discovered now.  He wanted to go on, and with a growing exultation he saw there was no intention on the part of the bateau’s crew to loiter on the way.  There was no stop at noon, and the tie-up did not come until the last glow of day was darkening into the gloom of night in the sky.  For sixteen hours the bateau had traveled steadily, and it could not have made less than sixty miles as the river ran.  The raft, David figured, had not traveled a third of the distance.

The fact that the bateau’s progress would bring him to Chateau Boulain many days, and perhaps weeks, before Black Roger and Marie-Anne could arrive on the raft did not check his enthusiasm.  It was this interval between their arrivals which held a great speculative promise for him.  In that time, if his efficiency had not entirely deserted him, he would surely make discoveries of importance.

Day after day the journey continued without rest.  On the fourth day after leaving Fort McMurray it was Joe Clamart who brought in David’s supper, and he grunted a protest at his long hours of muscle-breaking labor at the sweeps.  When David questioned him he shrugged his shoulders, and his mouth closed tight as a clam.  On the fifth, the bateau crossed the narrow western neck of Lake Athabasca, slipping past Chipewyan in the night, and on the sixth it entered the Slave River.  It was the fourteenth day when the bateau entered Great Slave Lake, and the second night after that, as dusk gathered thickly between the forest walls of the Yellowknife, David knew that at last they had reached the mouth of the dark and mysterious stream which led to the still more mysterious domain of Black Roger Audemard.

That night the rejoicing of the bateau men ashore was that of men who had come out from under a strain and were throwing off its tension for the first time in many days.  A great fire was built, and the men sang and laughed and shouted as they piled wood upon it.  In the flare of this fire a smaller one was built, and kettles and pans were soon bubbling and sizzling over it, and a great coffee pot that