At nine o'clock that night his three friends sat near their roaring camp-fire on the lake shore, wondering at his protracted absence. The guide had turned in an hour previous, but the three were anxious, so they sat and smoked, and discussed the question, piling great drift-logs on their fire till it roared and cracked in fierce exultation and leaped high in air to guide the wanderer home. Its long, crimson reflection stretched like a pathway of flame far over the black waters of the lake, and the three sat and waited, now glancing along this glowing path, anon conversing in subdued tones. The lake was as still and dark as a lake of pitch, and some way the three felt ill at ease, as though some evil impended. At last the veteran of the trio broke a longer silence than usual: “Boys, I don't like this. It's ten o'clock and he should have been back long ago. I hope to Heaven----” A touch on his arm from the man at his right caused him to glance quickly lakeward. Forty feet from them, drifting noiselessly into the firelight, was the Peterboro, with Moeran kneeling as usual and sending the light craft forward in some mysterious manner which required no perceptible movement of the arms nor lifting of the paddle. It was a fine exhibition of his skill to thus approach unheard three anxious, listening men on such a night, for he had heard their voices good two miles away. His appearance was so sudden, so ghostlike, that for a few seconds the party stared in mute surprise at the forms of man and craft standing out in sharp relief against the blackness of the night; then a whoop of delight welcomed him. He came ashore, swiftly picked up the canoe and turned it bottom upward on the sand for the night, carried his rifle into camp, then approached the fire and looked sharply round. “The guide's asleep.” “Oh, he is; -------- him!” Then he flung himself down on the sand. Something in his tone and manner warned his friends not to talk, and they eyed him curiously. His face was white as death and drawn with an expression of utter exhaustion, and marked with grimy lines, showing where rivulets of sweat had trickled downward. As they looked, his eyes closed; he was going to sleep as he lay. Quietly the veteran busied himself getting food ready, and presently roused the slumberer. “Here, old chap, have a nip and eat a bite. Why, you're dead beat. Where on earth have you been?” A strangely hollow voice answered: “To the back lakes.” His listeners whistled a combined long-drawn “whew” of amazement, for right well they knew the leagues of toilsome travel this statement implied. “See anything?” “Wounded the old bull badly, and trailed him from the lakes to within five miles of here. That cur sleeping yonder sold us; but you hear me!” he exclaimed with sudden fierce energy, “_I'll get that moose if I have to stay in the woods forever!_”