Very slowly they moved through the swamp, for because of the gloom his paddle-strokes were exceedingly short, and he was feeling his way.  Frequently he ran into brush, or struck the boggy shore, and occasionally Nada would hold lighted matches while he extricated the canoe from tree-tops and driftwood that impeded the way.  He loved the brief glimpses he caught of her face in the match-glow, and twice he deliberately wasted the tiny flares that he might hold the vision of her a little longer.

At last he began to feel the pulse of a current against his paddle, and soon after that the star-mist began filtering through the thinning tree-tops again, so that he knew they were almost through the swamp.  Another half-hour and they were free of it, with a clear sky overhead and the cheering song of running water on both sides of them.

Nada sat up, and it was now so light that he could see the soft shimmer of her hair in the starlight.  He also saw a pretty little grimace in her face, even as she smiled at him.

“I—­I can’t move,” she exclaimed.  “Ugh! my feet are asleep—­”

“We’ll go ashore and stretch ourselves,” said McKay, who had looked at his watch in the light of the last match.  “We’ve two hours the start of Breault, and there is no other canoe.”

He began watching the shore closely, and it was not long before he made out the white smoothness of a sandbar on their right.  Here they landed and for half an hour rested their cramped limbs.

Then they went on, and in his heart McKay blessed the deep swamp that lay between them and Breault.

“I don’t think he can make it without a canoe, even if he guesses we went this way,” he explained to Nada.  “And that means—­we are safe.”

There was a cheery ring in his voice which would have changed to the deadness of cold iron could he have looked back into that sluggish pit of the Burntwood through which they had come, or could he have seen into the heart of the still blacker swamp.

For through the swamp, feeling his way in the black abysses and amid the monster-ghosts of darkness, came Peter.

And down the Burntwood, between the boggy mucklips of the swamp, a man followed with slow but deadly surety, guiding with a long pole two light cedar timbers which he had lashed together with wire, and which bore him safely and in triumph where the canoe had gone before him.

This man was Breault, the man-hunter.

“The swamp will hold him!” McKay was saying again, exultantly.  “Even if he guesses our way, the swamp will hold him back, Nada.”

“But he won’t know the way we have come,” cried Nada, the faith in her voice answering his own.  “Father John will guide him in another direction.”

Back in the pit-gloom, with a grim smile now and then relaxing the tight-set compression of his thin lips, and with eyes that stared like a night-owl’s into the gloom ahead of him, Breault poled steadily on.