His face and his hands were scratched and bleeding when they came to the narrow waterway, half lake and half river, which let into the Blind Loon.  Another minute and they were racing again through the water.  From the mouth of the channel he saw O’Grady and the Chippewayan a quarter of a mile ahead.  Five miles beyond them was the fourth portage.  It was hidden now by a thick pall of smoke rising slowly into the clear sky.  Neither Jan nor the Indian had caught the pungent odors of burning forests in the air, and they knew that it was a fresh fire.  Never in the years that Jan could remember had that portage been afire, and he wondered if this was another trick of O’Grady’s.  The fire spread rapidly as they advanced.  It burst forth in a dozen places along the shore of the lake, sending up huge volumes of black smoke riven by lurid tongues of flame.  O’Grady and his canoe became less and less distinct.  Finally they disappeared entirely in the lowering clouds of the conflagration.  Jan’s eyes searched the water as they approached shore, and at last he saw what he had expected to find—­O’Grady’s empty canoe drifting slowly away from the beach.  O’Grady and the Chippewayan were gone.

Over that half-mile portage Jan staggered with his eyes half closed and his breath coming in gasps.  The smoke blinded him, and at times the heat of the fire scorched his face.  In several places it had crossed the trail, and the hot embers burned through their moccasins.  Once Jackpine uttered a cry of pain.  But Jan’s lips were set.  Then, above the roar of the flames sweeping down upon the right of them, he caught the low thunder of Dead Man’s Whirlpool and the cataract that had made the portage necessary.  From the heated earth their feet came to a narrow ledge of rock, worn smooth by the furred and moccasined tread of centuries, with the chasm on one side of them and a wall of rock on the other.  Along the crest of that wall, a hundred feet above them, the fire swept in a tornado of flame and smoke.  A tree crashed behind them, a dozen seconds too late.  Then the trail widened and sloped down into the dip that ended the portage.  For an instant Jan paused to get his bearing, and behind him Jackpine shouted a warning.

Up out of the smoldering oven where O’Grady should have found his canoe two men were rushing toward them.  They were O’Grady and the Chippewayan.  He caught the gleam of a knife in the Indian’s hand.  In O’Grady’s there was something larger and darker—­a club, and Jan dropped his end of the canoe with a glad cry, and drew one of the knives from his belt.  Jackpine came to his side, with his hunting knife in his hand, measuring with glittering eyes the oncoming foe of his race—­the Chippewayan.