LITMIR.BIZ

      4. Dead Men's Bones

      CHAPTER IV.

       Table of Contents

      DEAD MEN'S BONES.

      From the first there was no doubt that I should be allowed to go with Mr. Dunleath. But he was not strong, and Uncle Fred thought he should wait for a week at least. In that time I worked hard, so that I might go with a clear conscience. And meanwhile Uncle Fred and Peggy saw far more of our guest than I did. Indeed he and Peggy became great friends, and spent hours together reading and talking by the river, though for my part I could not see what he found to talk about to a girl so often and so long, and I told Peggy so.

      "It's funny, isn't it?" she admitted humbly, but with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. "But then he isn't well, Bob, and you must make allowance for that."

      "I s'pose that's it," I conceded, and I wondered what she found to laugh at.

      Mr. Dunleath's convalescence was most confoundedly slow, I thought. I imagine Peggy had as much to do with retarding it as anything or anybody. For the first time I was forced to the realization that an otherwise sane man may prefer mooning about with a girl to the attractions of the woods and the river. At any rate, a fortnight elapsed before we made our start.

      But one morning I routed him out of his blankets in the gray dawn, had his bed rolled and roped while he dressed, and loaded the canoe so that she trimmed to my liking; that is, well down in the stern and up in the bow, which is best under most circumstances. And I remember still the importance I felt when I picked up the steering paddle and shoved off, waving it jauntily at Peggy and Uncle Fred on the bank; and yet with a certain preoccupied dignity, for was I not now a man and a guide?

      I have no intention of describing the next three weeks in detail because they contain little of interest. We went down the Carcajou by easy stages and into the Little Windy, with its chain of lakes—where I managed to lose myself completely for several days, though my companion did not know it—and from there into the Antler. Of course much of this was strange country to me, but on the whole I got along very well by aid of a good memory and a sharp eye, for at different times I had had very accurate descriptions of it.

      At first our stages were short, for my companion tired easily and was in no hurry. But after the first week his strength came back very fast—not having Peggy to warn him against the perils of overexertion, I suppose—and he delighted to test it. He was ignorant of many things which I supposed everybody knew, but he was quick to observe, and asked questions continually. Being a boy, I am afraid I was not above showing off a little. But if I could teach him things about a canoe and animals and fish and birds, and show him a lot of camping wrinkles, there were other things which he could teach me.

      I had always considered myself a good swimmer until I saw him in the water, and then I knew myself for a mere flapper, and immediately set about acquiring the strokes he employed so smoothly. Then, too, I discovered that he was "scienced," as we called it, meaning that he could box and wrestle. I was eager to be taught, and I think he enjoyed teaching me; but of course, as we had no gloves, we were a little handicapped in the boxing lessons, though we made rough pillows out of a flour sack and moss. But when it came to wrestling, though I was a strong, active youngster, he handled me as if I had been a baby, and I knew that when he had his full strength he would be a formidable opponent for any man, even my old hero, Dinny Pack. And, thinking of that one day, I told him of how Dinny had trimmed Nootka Charlie to a peak down by our landing.

      "Good for Dinny!" he approved. "I'd like to shake hands with him."

      "I wonder if you could lick him?" I speculated.

      "Do you?" he said, with a grin. "Well, my son, you'll never know because you couldn't hire me to try."

      We portaged over from the Antler into the Cuisse Lakes, and one day on the Upper Cuisse we landed to boil the tea pail and eat a lunch of cold venison and bannock. As we rested afterward my eye caught the glint of some white objects on the sand dunes a hundred yards or so away, and I walked over to examine them. They were bones, sticking out of the sand, but they were not scattered; they were in regular order, as if the animal to which they belonged lay below with its bony framework entire.

      "What do you suppose it was?" I asked Jim Dunleath.

      "By George," he said, "those are human ribs! It's a skeleton."

      "Let's dig him up!" I suggested.

      "I see plainly," he said, with a grin, "that you are destined for the medical profession. You have all the earmarks of a freshman med. All right, my resurrectionist friend, go to it."

      And so I fetched a broken shovel that we carried to shift coals on the bake kettle, and dug away. In a few minutes I had the gruesome thing bare. It had disarticulated long ago, and fell to pieces when the supporting sands were removed. The skull was whole, and the teeth still in their sockets. Evidently it was the skeleton of a big, able-bodied man. For some moments we stood in silence, looking down on all that was left of one who had dropped out from the long trail to tread a longer one.

      "‘Alas! Poor Yorick! I knew him well,’" said Jim Dunleath.

      "You did?" I cried in astonishment. "How can you tell just from the bones? Yorick? Was he a Swede?"

      "A Dane, I think. No, this isn't Yorick. I was just repeating a line from a play."

      Which was just like Jim Dunleath. Most men would have told me it was one of the best-known quotations, and made me feel ashamed of my ignorance, for at that time I had read no Shakespeare; but not Dunleath.

      "Oh, a play," I said. "Well, I wonder who this fellow was."

      "Some Indian, I suppose," he returned. "Poor devil! No way of—— Hello! What's this?"

      He stooped and picked from the bottom of the excavation a small metal box, blackened and discolored. In shape it looked like a little curling stone, and it was about four inches across and perhaps two inches deep.

      "Why," I said, "that's an old tobacco box. The old-timers used

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