A clump of stubby, heavy-stemmed spruce trees offered them shelter
from the chill night wind, and there, rolled in blankets, they
prepared to sleep.

But Bruce could not sleep. Driving a plane through clouds, mist and
sunshine for hours had made every nerve alert. And the strain of that
last sagging slide through the air was not to be relieved instantly. So
he lay there in his blankets, a tumult of ideas in his mind. This
wheat-field now? Had he really been misdirected by the compass on the
plane? To prove that he had not, he drew from his pocket a small compass,
and placing it in a spot of moonlight, took the relative direction of the
last ridge over which they had passed and the plane in the wheat-field.
He was right; the compass had been true. They were four hundred miles
northwest of the last mile of track laid on the Hudson Bay Railroad, deep
in a wilderness, over which they had traveled for hours without sighting
a single sign of white man's habitation. Yet, here they were at the edge
of a wheat-field.

What was the answer? Had some Indian tribe taken to farming? With the
forests alive with game, the streams with fish, this seemed impossible.
Of a sudden, the boy started. It was, of course--

The sudden snapping of a twig in the underbrush brought his mind back
with a jerk to their present plight. He wished they had brought the
rifles from the plane. Some animal was lurking there in the shadows.
Wolves, grizzlies, some unknown terror, perhaps?

Then, in another second his eyes bulged. In an open space, between two
spruce trees, where the moon shone brightly, had appeared for a moment a