The rain ceased, but the sky remained heavily overcast and darkness overtook them while yet some distance above the log camp and skirting the opposite shore. Eager as he was to meet Moncrossen, Bill decided not to risk crossing the river in the fast gathering darkness. Gradually the boat was worked toward shore and poled into the backwater of submerged beaver meadow. Landing upon a slope a couple of hundred yards back from the river, they tilted the boat on edge, and, inclining it forward, rested it upon the tops of stakes thrust into the ground. The blanket was spread, and with the roaring fire directly in front the uptilted boat made an excellent shelter. An awkward constraint, broken only by necessary monosyllables, had settled upon the two. On the river each had been too busy with the workin hand to give the other more than a passing thought, but now, in the intimacy of the campfire, each felt uneasily self-conscious. Supper over, Bill lighted his pipe and stared moodily into the flames with set face and brooding eye. From her position at his side Jeanne covertly watched the silent man. Of what was he thinking? Surely not of the girl--his wife! She winced at the word--but the tense, almost fierce expression of his face, the occasional spasmodic clenching of the great fists, could scarcely accompany a man's thoughts of his wife of an hour. Of Moncrossen? she wondered. Of the shooting of Jacques? Of the attack upon her? Of Wa-ha-ta-na-ta? But, no--the gray eyes were staring into the fire calmly, and in their depths she could see no gleam of hate nor steely glitter of rage. What was it he said the day she told him of the affair on Broken Knee? "I, too, could kill him for that." The girl gave it up, and fell to wondering what the morrow would bring forth. At daylight, when they poled the boat into the river, Bill gazed in surprise at the surface of the stream. A few belated ice cakes floated lazily in the current, and many uprooted snags reared their scraggly heads as they rolled sluggishly in the water. But what riveted his attention were the logs. Hundreds and hundreds of smoothly floating logs dotted the river, and as far as the eye could reach more logs were coming. He leaped to his feet and stood, shading his eyes with his hand. Far up the stream the surface seemed solid with logs, and here and there he could make out moving figures--tiny and frail they looked, like strange, misshapen insects, as they leaped from log to rolling log--the white-water men of the North. "It's the drive!" he cried excitedly. "_My_ drive! Come, pole for your life--we've got to work her across!" A mile farther down they swept around a wide bend, and before them loomed the cleared rollways of Moncrossen's camp, and on top of the slope, for all the world like fortifications commanding the river, were pile after pile of pyramided logs.