that morning meaning to make a happy day of it for a youngster; and he did it.

When I woke up next morning Rocky was fitting the packs on his donkeys. I was a little puzzled, wondering at first if he was testing the saddles, for he had said nothing about moving on; but when he joined us at breakfast the donkeys stood packed, ready to start. Then Robbie asked:

"Going to make a move, Rocky?"

"Yes! Reckon I'll git!" he answered quietly.

I ate in silence, thinking of what he was to face: many hundred of miles perhaps a thousand or two; many, many months may be a year or two; wild country, wild tribes, and wild beasts; floods and fever; accident, hunger, and disease; and alone!

When we had finished breakfast he rinsed out his beaker and hung it on one of the packs, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and, picking up his long walking-stick, tapped the donkeys lightly to turn them into the Kaffir footpath that led away north. They jogged on into place in single file.

Rocky paused a second before following, turned one brief grave glance on us, and said:

"Well. So long!"

He never came back!

-

- SIR PERCY FITZPATRICK. (From "Jock of the Bushveld")

THE IMPOSSIBLE

"BUT what can we do if it doesn't rain?" asked Hadly Curtiss. Erskine rolled over, kicked the fire with his booted foot, and yawned.

“Oh, I suppose we'd walk and carry the canoe," he answered. "It's only forty miles."

"Only forty miles! You know that's impossible! Over these rocks? And with our dunnage? We could fly as easily!"

"O you boy! When will you grow up? You must learn that nothing is impossible!"

Hadly frowned; he did not like to be called a "boy."

"But it is impossible," he said, doggedly, "and you know it!" Hadly rose from his blankets, and began to prepare the simple evening meal.

Conditions were discouraging. The two had come many miles into the northern woods. After much hard study in his medical course, Hadly Curtiss needed a long outing; but only because Erskine was willing to go had Mr. Curtiss permitted his son to take the journey. Erskine had been tutor and companion to the boy for three years, and Mr. Curtiss had learned to trust him. But Mr. Curtiss would have been an anxious father could he have seen his son and the tutor now. The summer had been unusually dry; by September the streams up which they had paddled had almost completely dried up. The two were trapped in the depths of the wilderness, forty miles from the river, and sixty miles farther from the outposts of civilization.

44

-

"And if it doesn't rain," thought Hadly Curtiss, "we shall have to try the impossible journey. We can't stay here we haven't food enough, or winter clothes. Yet how we can carry a canoe forty miles

"Why can't we start now?" he said aloud. "If we've got to do it, let's do it!"

"No," replied Erskine, "that would be foolish. If we don't know when it's going to rain, we at least know about when it will freeze, and that won't be for several weeks, anyway. The chances are that before long it will rain, and fill the streams enough to float the canoe."

The next day Hadly and Erskine, looking for game, climbed a rocky cliff close by their camp. Hadly was in advance. He heard a cry, turned, and saw Erskine slip, clutch madly at a shrub, and then fall to the bottom of the cliff.

With a white face, Hadly scrambled down. Erskine had fallen not more than ten feet, and had rolled perhaps twenty; but it had been enough. When Hadly came to the limp figure, calling, "Erskine, Erskine, are you hurt?" he saw a trickle of blood from a cut on his friend's forehead, and he knew from the twisted position of his arm that it was broken.

Hadly straightened Erskine out flat, bathed his head with water from the stream, and loosened his collar. Erskine soon opened his eyes, and looked wonderingly at Hadly; but he did not appear to recognize him, nor did he wince when Hadly moved the broken arm and bound it up with straight willow branches and strips from his neckerchief.

Nor did Erskine speak when Hadly lifted his limp body and staggered under it back to camp.

"It's lucky we studied bones this year," said Hadly to himself,

as he examined the disabled arm. "Lucky it isn't a compound fracture the small bone's all right. I hope I can set it so the

arm won't shorten."

But even when Hadly had set Erskine's arm, and had bound it in splints, even when, with needle and gut from the emergency kit, he had sewed up the cut on his head, the tutor remained speechless. He would swallow food and obey commands, but he refused to speak. Hadly regarded that as ominous.

"He's had a bad concussion," he thought. "I hope nothing worse follows. And it's got to rain now!"

But something worse did follow, and it did not rain. Erskine did not recover consciousness; he lay sluggishly responsive to loudly spoken commands, able to swallow and to breathe, but without sense. The young medical student guessed that the blow on the head had either injured the brain or that a broken bone was pressing upon it.

"An operation!" Hadly whispered to himself. "That's all that can save him and I don't know how!"

He must get Erskine out of the wilderness; unaided he must get him out together with the canoe. His preparations were simple. He cached almost all the goods. One rifle, one paddle, the canoe, the medical kit, a little salt, a frying pan, matches, a light axe that was all that Hadly decided to take with him. In order to save weight, he stripped himself of all except his lightest clothes, kept only a sweater to wear in the cold nights. He removed as many of Erskine's clothes as he believed the injured man could do without, and then lay down to sleep; he needed one good night's rest before he started.

But he was not to have it. Erskine moaned and rolled, and a dozen times in the night Hadly got up to administer a tiny

dose of strychnine from the emergency case, to give him a drink of water, or to adjust his blanket.

He was tired and sleepy when he cooked his breakfast the next morning, and packed his outfit tightly into the bow and the stern of the canoe. He lashed it tight, and then started off with the canoe on his shoulders.

He meant to walk through the stream bed, or along the banks as opportunity offered, for perhaps four hundred yards. Then he would set down the canoe, retrace his steps, and bring Erskine forward. He soon found, however, that unless he rested he could not carry Erskine so far as he could carry the canoe. He could balance the canoe across both his shoulders, with his head inside; but he had to lift and hold Erskine in his arms.

"That won't do," he said to himself, with pity in his eyes, as he looked at his suffering friend. "I must strap him on somehow."

Unfastening Erskine's belt, he slung it round the man's knees, and then kneeling down slipped it over his shoulder. Then, holding Erskine's good arm with both hands, he staggered to his feet. Erskine lay across his back, with his legs held by the belt, and his arm by Hadly's hands. His weight thus came upon the boy's shoulders.

When Hadly laid the limp body down by the canoe at the end of the first trip, he looked at his watch. "One hour for the two trips perhaps four hundred yards. Four hours to the mile two miles to the day-twenty days!"

For a moment Hadly was staggered.

"He won't live so long," he said to himself.

But he picked up the canoe and carried it ahead another four hundred yards. As time passed, Hadly found the task some