Lavois finished out the drive with his feet in bandages. He didn't do another stroke of work; and whenever the gang moved, following the tail of the drive down the crooked river, he went comfortably in the boat along with the cook and the tin ovens and the gang's dunnage. He was well treated and well fed; and when Ducat's gang overhauled the boss at the mouth of the river, Mark gave Lavois his full time and no one questioned it. Lavois grinned. "I wish ye'd hove me into the fire afore ye did," he said. CHAPTER II YOUNG TODHUNTER Some hundred miles south of Piper's Glen, and across an international boundary into the bargain, young James Todhunter had just heard the news that college was out of the question; that his father's health had broken down, and that it was most decidedly up to him to do something in the way of earning a living. "I can give you a small stake, Jim," his father said, "but it won't be very much. It is going to take a lot to take mother and me West and I'll be out of things a long while, I am afraid. How about it?" James Todhunter came of a family of sportsmen--his father and his favorite uncle had been big game hunters in their day--and he received the news as a sportsman would; and, to his credit, with never a thought of all that his prep. school prowess at athletics had been going to mean to him at college. "Fine," he said. "I'll manage," with all the conviction in the world and a total lack of ideas. It was not till that night that the big idea came. He'd always wanted to go North to the logging country--North to the region where his uncle had so often hunted and fished and felt the lure of the big timber. Why not go North and get a job? His parents would be away, he'd have a little money, and all the thoughtfully chosen kit he had inherited from his uncle the year before. The poor man had died possessed of little else but guns of the best makes, equipment of every known manufacture and sort for life in the wilds of every continent. It had been his passion, and he had spared no expense in making his outfit perfect from a sportsman's point of view. Much of the assortment had never been used, but there it was, perfect in every detail. "I'd better take everything he had of his northern camping stuff," said young Todhunter to himself. "You never know your luck." His own luck seemed pretty fair, for the first man he interviewed--an old friend of both his father and his uncle--knew the timber country well; had camped and surveyed all over it, and was acquainted with numerous guides, trappers, prospectors, and lumbermen. He, in turn, had a friend who thought young Todhunter might do worse than go to Millbrook.