“We are very glad to see you back,” Katherine answered soberly.  The sight of the bishop had set her pulses fluttering wildly, and she was hardly mistress of herself again, as yet.

“The journey has been delightful,” Mary rattled on, understanding the cause of Katherine’s fluctuating colour, and anxious to give her time to recover from her confusion.  “We are such a large party, too, that it has been like a perpetual picnic, with only two drawbacks which really mattered.”

“What were they?” asked Katherine, supposing the drawbacks to be some item of portage discomfort, or rainstorms which came at the wrong time.

“The first was a horrid little man, a Mr. Clay, who has come all the way from England to see Mr. Ferrars, and begged to be allowed to attach himself to our party.  A perfect little kill-joy he is, so prim, so proper and precise, that one is tempted to believe he must have been born a grown-up, and so has had no childhood at all.”

“Where is he now?  I did not notice that there was another stranger beside the bishop,” said Katherine, turning her head to look at the other boats, which were leading.

“We left him behind at the fish sheds with Mr. Ferrars,” said Mary.  “He has his own boat and his own men.  He turns his aristocratic little nose up at everything Canadian, and loudly pities anyone who is fated to live two or three hundred miles from a railway depot.  But he apparently has the most utter admiration for Mr. Ferrars, and the fright he was in the day we found the bones was, I am quite sure, entirely due to a fear he had lest it was Mr. Ferrars who had come to grief.”

“What bones, and where did you find them?” asked Katherine, with a start.

Mary shrugged her shoulders and answered:  “Two days ago we did a portage on the Albany, and came, at camping time, upon the gruesome spectacle of two skeletons lying side by side under a little shelter formed of snowshoes and spruce boughs.  We supposed that they must have been the Indians dispatched from Maxohama months ago with mails, only there were no mail bags, and no food bags either; so, of course, they might have been only ordinary Indians on a journey.  Our portage men insisted that the remains were those of Indians, to the intense relief of Mr. Clay.  The poor man was plainly in a great state of worry about the remains, and kept questioning Father as to whether there would be any likelihood of Mr. Ferrars trying to work his way down to the railroad in midwinter.”

“I should think those Indians must have been the men who were bringing the mail, and probably they were caught in a snowstorm and died in their sleep,” said Katherine.

“In that case what had become of the mail bags and the food sacks?” asked Mary.

“Stolen, doubtless, by other Indians,” replied Katherine, who then told Mary of the discovery she had made of the fragment of a letter in the hands of a child at the Ochre Lake encampment.