one thing of all others that he could not understand. When, at Two Rivers, Laughing Mary had turned to greet him in the firelight, he had noticed that her baby was wrapped in something brownish yellow, that even in the half darkness he was certain must be the brown bear-cub’s skin. He was too worn out either to reason the matter out or to drop it entirely from his mind.
Above him the stars were paling at last and the sky growing gray. He came to the headland where the lake seemed suddenly to end and where Jasper Peak, which towered directly over him now, sent a long rocky spur down to the water’s edge. Through Harbin’s Channel he crept, out into the second stretch of open water, a wide expanse, beginning to show blue instead of gray as the sky grew brighter. Over at his right he could see a little inlet and a line of sandy beach, above it a steep wooded hill with a cottage at the very summit. The miles of woods beyond, the bays and bold capes that bounded the lake, the undiscovered country claimed by the Pirate of Jasper Peak, for these he had no eyes and no
