“That came the time I mentioned when I gave you your revolver, and you remarked you would hate to be in a position where you might wish you had one.  I told you I had been there myself.  It was last August, on a lonely trail far east of here.  I had lain down during the intense heat of the day to sleep, only to wake to see his peering eyes, to feel that my feet were tied together, my hands caught in his vise-like clutch, bound together.  Then I was dragged to a tree and lashed to it by yards of leather strapping, and all the time looking into the barrel of his revolver.  He searched every stitch of clothing I had on, but he did not find the map.  I was not armed, was perfectly helpless, and he left me lashed to that tree, naked all but my trousers and socks.  I was there forty hours.  The black flies came in swarms, the mosquitoes in thousands, and the second night timber wolves barked in the distance.  Towards morning they came nearer, nearer.  The agony from the insects made me desperate, but it was the yapping of those wolves that drove me crazy.  I chewed through the leather straps binding my shoulder, chewed the shoulder with it, boy, and broke loose, with the blood running from every fly-bite, my eyes blinded with their poison, my throat cracked with thirst.  I staggered to the river to drink, drink, drink, to lie in its cool waters, then to drink again, again, again.”

Jack’s face blanched, his hands turned stiff with cold, at the horror of the tale.

“When I could really see with my eyes,” continued Larry, “I discovered, while looking into the still river, that this powder had puffed itself above my ears.”

“And the map?” questioned Jack.

“Oh, the map?  Well, he didn’t get that,” answered Larry, in something of his natural voice.  “You see, I had once an accident, breaking through the ice on the lake.  The map got wet and was almost destroyed, so I copied it out on cotton with marking ink, and sewed it inside the lining of my coat, and it did not crackle, as the paper map would have done had he passed his hands over it.  Why, he never suspected it was there.”

Jack drew a great breath of relief.  “I wouldn’t care if he did get it, Larry, so long as he left you alive.”

“Oh, he’s too cowardly to kill a man outright; don’t be afraid of that.  But he’s after the King’s Coin, all right,” was the reply.

“And he don’t get King’s Coin, not while I live—­me,” said the low voice of Fox-Foot, as, with squared shoulders and set teeth, he gripped his paddle firmly and started up the long stretch of Ten-mile Lake.

* * * * * * * *

All that night Larry and Jack slept in the canoe, while the Chippewa boy paddled noiselessly, mile after mile.  Above them the loons laughed, and herons called, and in the dense forest ashore foxes barked and owls hooted.  A beautiful bow of light arched itself in the north, its long, silvery fingers stretching and darting up to the sky’s zenith.  But the Indian paddled on.  Those wild sounds and scenes were his birthright, and he knew no fear of them.