held two gallons sent out its steam laden with an aroma that mingled joyously with the balsam and cedar smells in the air.  David could see the whole thing from his window, and when Joe Clamart came in with supper, he found the meat they were cooking over the fire was fresh moose steak.  As there had been no trading or firing of guns coming down, he was puzzled and when he asked where the meat had come from Joe Clamart only shrugged his shoulders and winked an eye, and went out singing about the allouette bird that had everything plucked from it, one by one.  But David noticed there were never more than four men ashore at the same time.  At least one was always aboard the bateau, watching his door and windows.

And he, too, felt the thrill of an excitement working subtly within him, and this thrill pounded in swifter running blood when he saw the men about the fire jump to their feet suddenly and go to meet new and shadowy figures that came up indistinctly just in the edge of the forest gloom.  There they mingled and were lost in. identity for a long time, and David wondered if the newcomers were of the people of Chateau Boulain.  After that, Bateese and Joe Clamart and two others stamped out the fires and came over the plank to the bateau to sleep.  David followed their example and went to bed.

The cook fires were burning again before the gray dawn was broken by a tint of the sun, and when the voices of many men roused David, he went to his window and saw a dozen figures where last night there had been only four.  When it grew lighter he recognized none of them.  All were strangers.  Then he realized the significance of their presence.  The bateau had been traveling north, but downstream.  Now it would still travel north, but the water of the Yellow-knife flowed south into Great Slave Lake, and the bateau must be towed.  He caught a glimpse of the two big York boats a little later, and six rowers to a boat, and after that the bateau set out slowly but steadily upstream.

For hours David was at one window or the other, with something of awe working inside him as he saw what they were passing through—­ and between.  He fancied the water trail was like an entrance into a forbidden land, a region of vast and unbroken mystery, a country of enchantment, possibly of death, shut out from the world he had known.  For the stream narrowed, and the forest along the shores was so dense he could not see into it.  The tree-tops hung in a tangled canopy overhead, and a gloom of twilight filled the channel below, so that where the sun shot through, it was like filtered moonlight shining on black oil.  There was no sound except the dull, steady beat of the rowers’ oars, and the ripple of water along the sides of the bateau.  The men did not sing or laugh, and if they talked it must have been in whispers.  There was no cry of birds from ashore.  And once David saw Joe Clamart’s face as he passed the window, and it was set and hard and filled with the superstition of a man who was passing through a devil-country.