It was nearly sunset when the two boys slipped away from the camp to the secluded spot where they were to meet Etienne. Seating themselves on the fallen tree trunk, they began at once to talk of the subject uppermost in their thoughts. In a week or two the canoes would be ready to start back around the shore of the lake to the Sault, and thence to Montreal, where they would arrive late in September. Jean and Ronald, however, were not obliged to return the whole distance, although, up to the night before, they had intended to do so. They had spent the previous winter at the Sault de Ste. Marie, the falls of the river St. Mary which connects Lake Superior with Lake Huron. Jean had been staying with a French family there, friends of his father, while Ronald, who had made the trip from Montreal with his uncle in the autumn, had remained, after the latter's return, as a volunteer helper to the Company's agent at the Sault. Before pledging him to the Company's service for a term of years, his uncle had wished him to learn whether he really liked the business of fur-trading. When, in the spring, the canoe fleet from Montreal had arrived at the Sault, it had been short handed. Two men had been killed and several seriously injured in an accident on the way. So it happened that Jean and Ronald, expert canoemen and eager to make the Superior trip, had been engaged with three others. Their contracts were only for the voyage from the Sault to the Grande Portage and back again to the Sault, and they were under no obligation to go on with the fleet to Montreal.
Whether there would be time, before cold weather and winter storms set in, to come back to the lake and join the Indian in a search for the Island of Yellow Sands, they could not be sure until they had consulted him. They hoped ardently that they could make the attempt that year, for who could tell what might happen before another spring? As Ronald pointed out, Etienne alone knew how to reach the island. If anything should go wrong with him, they would have no guide. Moreover, in the interval, some other white man might discover the place. Indeed Etienne, though Jean thought that unlikely, might take it into his head to lead some one else there.