LOWERED THE CAN CAUTIOUSLY BY A STRING

NORTHERN DIAMONDS

BY

FRANK LILLIE POLLOCK

With Illustrations

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1917

COPYRIGHT, 1914 AND 1915, BY PERRY MASON COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY FRANK LILLIE POLLOCK

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published September 1917

NOTE

This book has appeared in the Youth's Companion in the form of a serial and sequel, and my thanks are due to the proprietors of that periodical for permission to reprint.

FRANK LILLIE POLLOCK

ILLUSTRATIONS

LOWERED THE CAN CAUTIOUSLY BY A STRING . . . . . . Frontispiece

THE OTHER BOYS HAD BEEN BUSY

"THAT IS OUR CABIN. LET US COME IN, I SAY"

DRAGGED HIM UP, PROTESTING, AND RUBBED SNOW ON HIS EARS

FLUNG THE SACK INTO THE MAN'S LAP

From drawings by Harry C. Edwards

NORTHERN DIAMONDS

CHAPTER I

It was nearly eleven o'clock at night when some one knocked at the door of Fred Osborne's room. He was not in the least expecting any caller at that hour, and had paid no attention when he had heard the doorbell of the boarding-house ring downstairs, and the sound of feet ascending the steps. He hastened to open the door, however, and in the dim hallway he recognized the dark, handsome face of Maurice Stark, and behind it the tall, raw-boned form of Peter Macgregor.

Both of them uttered an exclamation of satisfaction at seeing him. They were both in fur caps and overcoats, for it was a sharp Canadian December night, and at the first glance Fred observed that their faces wore an expression of excitement.

"Come in, boys!" he said. "I wasn't going to bed. Here, take your coats off. What's up? You look as if something was the matter."

"Is Horace in town?" demanded Peter.

Fred shook his head. Horace was his elder brother, a mining engineer mostly employed in the North Country.

"He's still somewhere in the North Woods. I haven't heard from him since October, but I'm expecting him to turn up almost any day now. Why, what's the matter?"

"The matter? Something pretty big," returned Maurice.

Maurice Stark was Fred's most intimate friend in Toronto University, from which he had himself graduated the summer before. He knew Macgregor less well, for the big Scotch-Canadian was in the medical school. His home place was somewhere far up in the North Woods, but he had a great intercollegiate reputation as a long-distance runner. It was, in fact, chiefly in a sporting way that Fred had come to know him, for Fred held an amateur skating championship, and was even then training for the ice tournament to be held in Toronto in a few weeks.

"It's something big!" Maurice repeated. "I wish Horace were here, but—could you get a holiday from your office for a week or ten days?"

"I've got it already," said Fred. "I reserved my holidays last summer, and things aren't busy in a real estate office at this time of year. I guess I could get two weeks if I wanted it. I'm spending most of my time now training for the five and ten miles."

"Could you skate a hundred and fifty miles in two days?" demanded Macgregor.

"I might if I had to—if it was a case of life and death."

"That's just what it is—a case of life and death, and possibly a fortune into the bargain!" cried Maurice. "You see—but Mac has the whole story."

The Scottish medical student went to the window, raised the blind and peered out at the wintry sky.

"No sign of snow yet," he said in a tone of satisfaction.

"What's that got to do with it?" demanded Fred, who was burning with curiosity by this time. "What's going on, anyway? Hurry up."

"Spoil the skating," said Macgregor briefly. "Well," he went on after a moment, "this is how I had the story.

"I live away up north of North Bay, you know, at a little place called Muirhead. I went home for a little visit last week, and the second day I was there they brought in a sick Indian from Hickson, a little farther north—sick with smallpox. The Hickson authorities wouldn't have him at any price, and they had just passed him on to us. The people at Muirhead didn't want him either. It wasn't such a very bad case of smallpox, but the poor wretch had suffered a good deal of exposure, and he was pretty shaky. Everybody was in a panic about him; they wanted to ship him straight down to North Bay; but finally I got him fixed up in a sort of isolation camp and looked after him myself."

"Good for you, Mac!" Fred ejaculated.

"Oh, it was good hospital training, and I'd been recently vaccinated, so I didn't run any danger. It paid me, though, for when I'd pulled him around a bit he told me the story, and a queer tale it was."

Macgregor paused and went to look out of the window again with anxiety. Fred was listening breathlessly.

"It seems that last September this Indian, along with a couple of half-breeds, went up into the woods for the winter trapping, and built a cabin on one of the branches of the Abitibi River, away up northeast of Lake Timagami. I know about where it was. I suppose you've never been up in that country, Osborne?"

"Never quite as far as that. Last summer I was nearly up to Timagami with Horace."

Fred had made a good many canoeing trips into the Northern wilderness with his brother, and Horace himself, as mining engineer, surveyor, and free-lance prospector, had spent most of the last five years in that region. At irregular and generally unexpected times he would turn up in Toronto with a bale of furs, a sack of mineralogical specimens, and a book of geological notes, which would presently appear in the "University Science Quarterly," or even in more important publications. He was an Associate of the Canadian Geographical Society, and always expected to hit on a vein of mineral that would make his whole family millionaires.

"Well, I've been up and down the Abitibi in a canoe," Macgregor went on, "and I think I know almost the exact spot where they must have built the cabin. Anyhow, I'm certain I could find it, for the Indian described it as accurately as he could.

"It seems that the three men trapped there till the end of October, and then a white man came into their camp. He was all alone, and