The brown smudges in single file went on and on. Noon at the foot of the portage at Oxbow! Lida sniffed the wood smoke of the cook fire and ate her lunch and drank her tea. Up the narrow trail of the gorge she followed at the rear of her men; the canoes, upturned on their shoulders, glistened in the sparkling sunshine. She was bringing real aid in a time of stress, as one of the Flaggs should! More and more that consciousness heartened her. Quiet water at the put-in, then rapids where the canoes were poled, the irons clinking on the rocks over which the turbid waters rolled; more calm stretches where haste was made. A night in the open at a camping site where a couch of boughs was piled for her under a deftly contrived shelter of braided branches of hemlocks. And on in the first flush of the morning toward the drive. CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Ben Kyle made "his bigness" when he went into Flagg's crew on his mission for Craig. He was not admitting to himself or anybody else that he was traitor. He blustered and bullyragged; he had been their boss and he had been fired without cause, he insisted. Even the loyal men did not presume to answer back; he had been too recently their master and the aura of authority still persisted. He came with a white-hot grudge and with rumors which he embroidered to suit his needs. Kyle had been far on the edge of affairs, and only the ripples of the Adonia events reached him. But his statement that Latisan had run away with a girl seemed to be certified by the drive master's continued absence. And there were those stories of Latisan's former weakness in the city; they had been sleeping; they were not dead. Kyle was hiring for the Comas company--unabashed, blatantly. He strode from man to man, banging heavy palm on shoulders. "Come with the real folks. What's old Eck Flagg to-day? You might as well be hired by a bottle-sucking brat in a baby carriage. Where's Latisan? You tell me his men went downriver to meet him; they've kept on going. He has hid away, dancing his doxy on his knee. Where's your pay coming from when Eck Flagg goes broke?" Kyle waded in the shallows where men were rolling logs, shouting to be heard above the roar of the waters. "We hired for a fight," said the men who hated the Comas. "But it doesn't look like one is going to be made." "We've always stood behind Eck Flagg," said the old stand-bys of the crew. "But we ain't getting a square chance for honest work." It was plain that the spirit was being beaten out of them under the hammer of Kyle's harangue--whether it was the adventurous spirit which craved fight or the honest spirit which had sent them north to the job.