The Indians had remained there all the winter, so they said, because there was such an abundance of fish for food.  Their winter quarters consisted of holes, about four feet deep, dug in the earth, roofed over with spruce branches heaped with snow.  Fires were kindled in these lairs, and the people rarely came out save when driven to it by the necessity to catch fish for food.

The day Katherine and Miles went to the encampment it was gloriously fine, and for the first time that year the sun had real warmth in it.  This had induced some of the miserable creatures to crawl out to the daylight, who perhaps had not been outside the holes for weeks.  There was quite a crowd of children visible, and Katherine, whose heart always warmed to the pitiable little objects, with their mournful black eyes, produced a packet of sweets, which speedily brought a swarm of youngsters round her,

Doling the sweets out with strict impartiality, she noticed that one child had a fragment of paper in its skinny hand.  This was puzzling, for the Indians were not given to education or culture in any shape or form, and the paper looked like a fragment from a letter, for she could plainly see writing upon it.

With a sign to Miles to keep the elders busy, Katherine proceeded to bribe the child to give up his dirty fragment of paper in exchange for the bag, which still had some sweets in it.

When this was done, she told Miles to cut the business short, and then they started for home.  She had thrust the fragment of paper in her glove, and did not venture to look at it until they were miles away from the lake, because she did not wish the Indians to know that her curiosity had been aroused.  But when the dogs had dropped into a walk, and were coming slowly up the hill at some distance behind, she pulled off her glove and proceeded to examine the dirty fragment.

It was part of a letter, and directly she saw it she recognized the handwriting as that of Mrs. Ferrars, the mother of Jervis.  He had shown her some of his mother’s letters, and there was no mistaking the regular, delicate handwriting.  The paper was only written on on one side, and only two lines of the writing were legible: 

  “—­is very ill; you may be sent for now at any time.”

Katherine pondered over the dirty fragment with a very puzzled expression.  There were three ways of explaining the presence of that bit of paper at the encampment on Ochre Lake:  it might have been stolen from Jervis by the Indians, when they came down to the Cove; or the Indians coming up from Maxohama might have been robbed of the mails they were bringing by other Indians; or they might have perished in one of the winter storms, and the bags might have been found afterwards, and appropriated as justifiable treasure trove.