"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..