All eyes fell away from his face.  Hank poked up the logs with his boot, and Morris seized an ember in his bare fingers to light his pipe, although it was already emitting clouds of smoke.  But the professor caught the ball flying.

“I thought you said he sank without a cry,” he remarked quietly, looking straight up into the frightened face opposite, and then riddling mercilessly the confused explanation that followed.

The cumulative effect of all these forces, hitherto so rigorously repressed, now made itself felt, and the circle spontaneously broke up, everybody moving at once by a common instinct.  The professor’s wife left the party abruptly, with excuses about an early start next morning.  She first shook hands with Rushton, mumbling something about his comfort in the night.

The question of his comfort, however, devolved by force of circumstances upon myself, and he shared my tent.  Just before wrapping up in my double blankets—­for the night was bitterly cold—­he turned and began to explain that he had a habit of talking in his sleep and hoped I would wake him if he disturbed me by doing so.

Well, he did talk in his sleep—­and it disturbed me very much indeed.  The anger and violence of his words remain with me to this day, and it was clear in a minute that he was living over again some portion of the scene upon the lake.  I listened, horror-struck, for a moment or two, and then understood that I was face to face with one of two alternatives:  I must continue an unwilling eavesdropper, or I must waken him.  The former was impossible for me, yet I shrank from the latter with the greatest repugnance; and in my dilemma I saw the only way out of the difficulty and at once accepted it.

Cold though it was, I crawled stealthily out of my warm sleeping-bag and left the tent, intending to keep the old fire alight under the stars and spend the remaining hours till daylight in the open.

As soon as I was out I noticed at once another figure moving silently along the shore.  It was Hank Milligan, and it was plain enough what he was doing:  he was examining the holes that had been cut in the upper ribs of the canoe.  He looked half ashamed when I came up with him, and mumbled something about not being able to sleep for the cold.  But, there, standing together beside the over-turned canoe, we both saw that the holes were far too small for a man’s hand and arm and could not possibly have been cut by two men hanging on for their lives in deep water.  Those holes had been made afterwards.

Hank said nothing to me and I said nothing to Hank, and presently he moved off to collect logs for the fire, which needed replenishing, for it was a piercingly cold night and there were many degrees of frost.

Three days later Hank and Silver Fizz followed with stumbling footsteps the old Indian trail that leads from Beaver Creek to the southwards.  A hammock was slung between them, and it weighed heavily.  Yet neither of the men complained; and, indeed, speech between them was almost nothing.  Their thoughts, however, were exceedingly busy, and the terrible secret of the woods which formed their burden weighed far more heavily than the uncouth, shifting mass that lay in the swinging hammock and tugged so severely at their shoulders.