While Chip, bound, gagged, and helpless in the half-breed's canoe, was just entering the alder-choked outlet of this lake, twenty miles below and close to where the stream entered another lake, four men were launching their canoes. "It was here," Martin was saying to Hersey, "one moonlight night a year ago, that a friend of mine and myself saw a spectral man astride a log, just entering that bed of reeds, as I told you. Who or what it was, we could not guess; but as that spook canoeman went up this stream, we followed and discovered our hermit's home." "Night-time and moonshine play queer pranks with our imagination," Hersey responded. "I'm not a whit superstitious, and yet I've many a time seen what I thought to be a hunter creeping along the lake shore at night, and I once came near plugging a fat man in a shadowy glen. I was up on a cliff watching down into it, the day was cloudy, and 'way below I saw what I was sure was a bear crawling along the bank of the stream. I had my rifle raised and was only waiting for a better sight, when up rose the bear and I saw a human face. For a moment it made me faint, and since then I make doubly sure before shooting at any object in the woods." And now these four men, Levi wielding the stern paddle of Martin's canoe, and Hersey's deputy that of his, entered the broad, winding stream. The tall spruce-tops meeting darkened its currentless course, long filaments of white moss depended from every limb, and as they twisted and turned up this sombre highway, the air grew stifling. Not a breeze, not a sound, disturbed the solemn silence, and except for the swish of paddles and faint thud as they touched gunwales, the fall of a leaf might have been heard. So dense was this dark, silent forest, and so forbidding its effect, that for an hour no one scarce spoke, and even when the two canoes finally drew together, converse came in whispers. Another hour of steady progress, and then the banks began to outline themselves ahead, the trees opened more, a sign of current was met, and the sun lit up their pathway. By now the spectral beard had vanished from the trees, white clouds were reflected from the still waters, and the gleam of sandy bottom was seen below. The birds, inspired perhaps by the absence of gloom, also added their cheering notes, Nature was smiling once more, and not a hint or even intuition of the fast-nearing tragedy met those men. And then, as a broad, eddying bend in the stream held their canoes, by tacit consent a halt was made.