stolidly onward, her face to the front, expressionless, hiding whatever
pain she may have felt. This side of noon, however, the travellers came
to a cataract falling over a fifty-foot ledge into a long,
cliff-bordered pool.

It became necessary to portage. The hill pinched down steep and close.
There existed no trails. Dick took the little camp axe to find a way. He
clambered up one after the other three ravines--grown with brush and
heavy ferns, damp with a trickle of water,--always to be stopped near
the summit by a blank wall impossible to scale. At length he found a
passage he thought might be practicable. Thereupon he cut a canoe trail
back to the water-side.

In clearing this trail his attention turned to making room for a canoe
on a man's back. Therefore the footing he bothered with not at all.
Saplings he clipped down by bending them with the left hand, and
striking at the strained fibres where they bowed. A single blow would
thus fell treelets of some size. When he had finished his work there
resulted a winding, cylindrical hole in the forest growth some three
feet from the ground. Through this cylinder the canoe would be passed
while its bearer picked a practised way among slippery rocks, old stubs,
new sapling stumps, and undergrowth below. Men who might, in later
years, wish to follow this Indian trail, would look not for footprints
but for waist-high indications of the axe.

When the canoe had been carried to the top of the bluff that marked the
water-fall, it was relaunched in a pool. In the meantime May-may-gwán,
who had at last found a use for her willingness, carried the packs. Dick
re-embarked. His companion perceived that he intended to shove off as
soon as the other should have taken his place. Sam frustrated that,