At daylight he beached the canoe so motionlessly the sleepers never stirred, and he wakened them only when he had the coffee made and a huge pan of delicious bacon fried above the coals.  Both of the paleface friends then arose, yawned, stretched, stripped and plunged into the lake, to swim about for a few moments, and then to jump into their shirts and sweaters, and fall upon the coffee and bacon with fine relish.

“I believe,” said Jack, devouring his third helping, “that my eyes are better.  They don’t ache or smart in the least to-day.”

“Eye bad?” asked Fox-Foot.

Jack explained.

“I cure, me, if you like.  Root good for bad eye grows here, north,” said the Chippewa.

“Better let him try,” urged Larry.  “He knows all these things.  His flower seeds have evidently put the kibosh on the man in the mackinaw.”

“I get root, you try.  No harm,” said the Indian.  “You scairt put in your eye, then just smell it, and tie round your head.”

“I’ll try it, by all means,” asserted Jack.

So, at noon, while Larry and Jack cooked the dinner, Fox-Foot penetrated the woods, returning with some crooked little brown roots, which he bound about Jack’s forehead and made him inhale.  They exuded a peculiar sweetish odor, that seemed to wash the eyeball like water, and when the afternoon was half spent, Jack remarked that his eyelids had ceased to smart.

“One week, maybe, be all right,” answered the Indian.  And his words proved correct.  Daily he gathered fresh roots, treating Jack’s eyes as skilfully as the oldest medicine man of his tribe could have done, until the poor red rims faded white, and the bloodshot eyeballs grew clear and bluish.  Jack was beside himself with gratitude and delight, his one regret being that there was no possible way of mailing a letter to his parents telling them the good news.  This week was one of work, sometimes toil.  Often they encountered rapids over which they must portage.  Once it was a whole mile through brush and rock and deep, soft mosses, but still they struggled on, until one evening, as they pitched camp and lighted their fire, Fox-Foot said coolly: 

“You know this place, Larry?”

“No,” was the answer, “never saw it before.”

“The reason you say that,” said the Indian, “is ’cause you come and go over that bluff behind us.  Lake Nameless just twenty yards ’cross that bluff.”

“What!” yelled Larry.

“I bring you in other side.  Bluff separate this river and Lake Nameless.  There is your cache,” laughed Fox-Foot, throwing a pebble and striking a point of red rock ten yards away.

Larry and Jack fairly stumbled over their own feet to get there.  Every mark that Matt Larson had left to identify the hiding-place of his treasure still remained undisturbed.  The round white pebble placed near the shelving rock, the three-cornered flint, the fine, tiny grey bits of stone set like a bird’s eggs in a nest of lichen, the two standing pines with a third fallen, storm-wrecked, at their roots—­every landmark was there, intact.