Her beauty was still self-contained. She shook hands as a matter of ceremony, without giving Ralph her eyes.
"What's the matter now?" he wondered with a sinking heart.
The three of them breakfasted in the grass. The food was good, but Ralph's spirits were flat. He had supposed that, relieved of the presence of Joe Mixer and the others, she would unbend with him. Apparently she had no such intention. Then there was the boy. The horrid suspicion became fixed in Ralph's mind that the boy was going with them. Alas! for his dreams! The girl and the boy talked together in their own liquid tongue, and from the latter's sidelong, beady glances Ralph had no difficulty in guessing that he was the subject of it. The fact did not help to put him at his ease.
The boy's undeniable good looks offended Ralph. Wholly savage he was, but clear-skinned, lithe as a cat, and beautifully made. Ralph could not but wonder, biting his lips a little, what they were to each other. Whatever the relation, she was clearly the leading spirit; she ordered and the boy obeyed, albeit sometimes sullenly. Under her imperious ways with the boy Ralph thought he perceived a certain affectionate air that lighted a pretty little fire in him. His pride was up in arms then, that an Indian lad was able to make him jealous.
After breakfast she sent the boy to cut spruce branches, and Ralph had a moment alone with her. He lost no time in coming to the point.
"What's the matter?" he demanded to know.
"Nothing," she said.
"Have I done anything to make you sore?" he persisted.
"No," she said.
"Then why do you treat me like an enemy?"
The girl shrugged impatiently, and scowled, and looked away across the water, exquisitely uncomfortable. "I don't know you," she muttered. "You are strange to me."
Ralph took a little hope from this. At least she was not wholly indifferent. "Who's that boy?" he asked, trying to say it casually.
"That is Charley," she said, with a warm gleam in her eyes that stabbed Ralph.
"Is he going with us?" he cried. He could not pretend to be indifferent.
"Sure!" she said, opening her eyes wide.
Ralph turned on his heel. He could not trust himself to pursue his inquiries. All his delightful imaginings of the trip to come collapsed like card-houses. Her husband or her lover, of course! What a fool he had been!
Their dugout floated at the edge of the grass, an unconscionably long and slender craft, hollowed out of the trunk of a cottonwood tree. It required a nice calculation to bestow all their belongings in it to advantage. During this operation Ralph observed that there were three little tents, and took heart of grace once more. On such trifles his spirits seesawed up and down all day. True, he could have ended the state of suspense at any time by a plain question, but he dared not for fear of hearing the worst.
When the baggage was packed, Nahnya commanded Ralph to sit upon the spruce boughs which had been laid for him in the bottom near the stern. In getting in the cranky craft he narrowly escaped pitching out on the other side, to Nahnya's and Charley's undisguised amusement. Charley took the bow paddle, Nahnya the stern, and they pushed off from the shore.
Ralph had the feeling that he was cutting loose with one stroke from everything he had known in life up to that moment. "We're off!" he thought grimly. "I'm elected for something, I don't know what! Where will I be this time to-morrow? this time next month?"
The lake was like mother-of-pearl under the misty, early sunshine; all around the shore it was backed by an unbroken border of fantastic, serrated jack-pines. Out in the middle floated the half-dozen little islands which had provided its name Hat Lake. Each had a brim of yellow beach, a band of willows, and a pine plume or two sticking up in the middle, and the group instantly suggested a display of spring millinery.
They had not gone above a quarter of a mile, when hearing the surprising sound of a shout behind them, the three of them turned as one to behold a horseman riding down to the water's edge at the late point of departure. He flung himself off his horse; from his bulk it was not difficult to recognize Joe Mixer. He shouted to them to return. Nahnya and Charley waved their paddles once like semaphores, and coolly kept on. Ralph, continuing to look, sensed the fat man dancing in the grass with rage, and brandishing his fists. In his mind's ear he could hear his surprising oaths. Joe Mixer was eloquent and fertile in profanity.
"We not start too soon," Nahnya said calmly.
"He'll be laying for me when I come back," said Ralph carelessly.
"You not come back this way," was Nahnya's surprising answer.
They did not traverse the main body of the lake, but turned into a bay in the right-hand shore. It had no visible outlet, but they kept steadily on, threading their way through lily pads and reeds, while the shores came closer and closer. The water narrowed until it was no more than a slack inlet, twisting interminably through the ooze. At last a scarcely perceptible current began to bear them on, and Ralph saw that they had entered a river.
"This water go far," Nahnya said. "Far as the sea of ice; two months' journey, I guess."
It was the first time in an hour that she had addressed him, and Ralph's heart looked up. He twisted his head to look at her, and the dugout lurched alarmingly.
"Sit quiet!" she ordered sharply.
Rebuked, he kept his eyes front thereafter. "What's the river's name?" he asked meekly enough.
"Got no name here," she said.
"Call it the Doll River, for its size."
"In five days you see it half a mile wide," she said.
As the current increased its flow the stream became narrower still, and the willow branches brushed their faces on one side and the other. With its dense, low willows, its endless sharp turns, and its brawling little rapids it was comically like the Campbell in miniature, only the dugout and themselves were out of scale.
Ralph felt like Gulliver in Lilliput. He could not but admire the skill with which Nahnya snaked their long craft around the bends without jamming it.
The crookedness of the stream was incredible. There was a little eminence shaped like a teapot visible above the willows, now on one side, now on the other, before and behind. All day it was in sight without seeming to recede any.
They made their first spell to eat in a tiny flowery meadow beside the stream. Lunch was largely a repetition of breakfast. Ralph was making an effort to carry things lightly. Upon reëmbarking afterwards, he asked for a paddle.
"It's great to view the scenery sitting down like a first-class passenger," he said, "but I feel like a loafer."
Nahnya shook her head. "You fall overboard," she said coolly. "Wait till you grow in the boat."
Ralph acknowledged the reasonableness of this. In getting in the dugout, without consulting Nahnya, he faced around the other way so that at least he could have the satisfaction of looking at her while they moved along. Nahnya made no comment. He got no glances in return from her, for her eyes were fixed undeviatingly on her course.
When the current, slyly increasing its flow, swept them around a bend and bore them headlong into a rapid, Nahnya was transfigured. Poised at the helm, straight as a young pine tree, with her flashing, resolute, confident eyes fixed ahead—eyes with the fighting look, magnificent and intimidating—cheeks flushed, lips parted, round arms wielding the paddle with deft, strong strokes, she was a glorious sight for a man's eyes.
Ralph, drinking it in, thrilled with that kind of terror of women's beauty that the bravest man may confess without shame. "What man could ever presume to master a woman like that?" was the thought.
When they fell into smooth water again, and the tension relaxed, the heroines of his boyhood presented themselves one by one for comparison; Diana, Boadicea, Joan of Arc. He rejected them all. "Nahnya is only like herself!" he thought. Aloud he cried enthusiastically: "Nahnya, you're wonderful!"
Suddenly recalled to herself, she started, blushed, looked a little foolish, and scowled at the trees on shore. "Cut it out!" she muttered.
It struck him as an exactly fitting thing for her to say.
And then the thought that this superb woman-creature was likely the property of the insensible savage boy in the bow stabbed him afresh, and poisoned all his joy. "It can't be!" he had told himself a hundred times during the morning. "She could not stoop to that!"
All morning the question had been flung back and forth in his mind like a shuttle. He watched them unceasingly, building high castles of hope upon their apparent indifference to each other, only to have them cast flat when she spoke to the boy in their own tongue, words that he could not understand. He continually cast around in his mind for some way to find out what he wanted without putting the question direct, but without success. Ralph was painfully direct. After beholding Nahnya in her glory in the rapids, he could bear the suspense no longer. Choosing a moment when the going was easy and her attention was free to stray from the river, he hazarded all on a single throw.
"Nahnya, is Charley in your family?" he asked bluntly.
"He is my brother," she readily answered.
Relief unspeakable flooded Ralph's breast. "Why didn't you tell me?" he cried naïvely.
"Why should I?" said Nahnya coolly.
The rebuke was lost on him. Suddenly he found the sun smiling with an extraordinary graciousness on the river, and all the pine trees seemed to be full of little singing birds—as a matter of fact there are no warblers so far north. This was a glorious adventure that he was launched upon; Romance was alive and Life was good! He derided himself now for the timid folly that had prevented him putting the question before. Meanwhile the poor fellow was struggling not to let all this show in his face.
"What you think about Charley?" Nahnya asked idly.
"I thought maybe he was your husband," Ralph said, with a great air of carelessness.
She translated to the boy, and they both laughed. Ralph joined with them. "I got no husband," Nahnya said, with a scornful lift to her chin. "I not want any. I like better to work for myself!"
She might be as independent of men as she chose, so she was not owned by any man. "That's what every girl says," he remarked with a new audacity. "Until she catches a man, and makes him work for her!"
Nahnya declined to be drawn into the game. She affected to be busy with her course ahead.
"Charley does not look like you," Ralph said presently.
"Charley what you call my half brother," she said. "His father not the same as my father."
"Your father was a white man?" hazarded Ralph.
She calmly ignored the question. Ralph felt a little flattened out.
The rapids followed each other with short intervals between. The river having taken in several little tributaries during the day was less diminutive now, but no less charming. It was a jolly little stream that loved to surprise them with new tricks around every bend. It was not without its element of danger, too, at least to their baggage. Rounding a bend, Nahnya suddenly shouted a command to her brother, and leaped overboard. The water reached to her knees. Bracing herself against the tearing current, she held on grimly.
The startled Ralph looking around saw that Charley was likewise overboard. The reason was plain. A pine tree undermined by the current had toppled over to the opposite bank, and lay trailing its branches in the current, and completely blocking all passage. Ralph, though Nahnya forbade it, joined them in the icy water, and between the three of them they edged the boat ashore. Charley quickly chopped a way through.
They camped for the night on top of a bluff, about fifteen feet above the river. There was a little clearing and the remains of old campfires. The view upstream in the lingering twilight was enchanting. As time went on Ralph noticed that all the regular camping-places along the river had been chosen with a discriminating eye for beauty of outlook.
That evening Ralph's spirits blew a whole gale. He could be friendly enough with Charley now. By degrees he apprehended that the strange aloofness of both brother and sister was for the most part merely the aloofness of children; they required to be won. Since Ralph had a good deal of the child left in him, his instinct taught him how to set about it. To do his share of the work with a right good will; to put off the least suspicion of "side"; and to make fun—especially to make fun—such was his simple method. Ralph played the fool with all his might.
Charley soon succumbed. Charley was Boy in the concrete—simple, undiscerning, and hard-headed; limited in outlook, therefore prone to scorn. Nahnya was more complicated. Ralph's overtures at first only made her more skittish and distant. Ralph redoubled his efforts. "I'll make her laugh, or break a leg," he vowed.
And obliged to laugh she was, finally, at the sight of Ralph flipping cakes in the pan to the accompaniment of a double shuffle.
"You foolish!" she said scornfully; but her eyes were kind.
After supper, the mosquitoes being in abeyance, they lay for awhile in a row beside the fire, before turning in under their respective mosquito bars. By this time all constraint was melted. Ralph was accepted as one of them. It appeared that Charley knew more English than he had been prepared to confess to a stranger, so that he was not altogether shut out from their talk.
Ralph lay in the middle, his shoulder warm against Nahnya's while the happy blood flew through his veins. Meanwhile the old question asked itself, without any answer being forthcoming: was she feeling the same ecstasy as he, or was she unconscious of the delicious contact? Surely she must be aware of the current that leaped from her body into his. His hand groped slyly on the ground between them for hers, but without reward.
Nevertheless Nahnya really unbent, and proved for once that she could talk and laugh as easily as any girl. Ralph often looked back on that hour. The boy and girl gave him his first lesson in Cree;tepiskow—to-night;mooniyas—white man;pahkwishegan—bread; and so on, laughing endlessly at his efforts to pronounce the words. In return Ralph offered to extend Charley's knowledge of the English tongue, and set forth as his first exercise the ancient limerick:
A tutor who tooted the fluteTried to teach two young tooters to toot.Said the two to the tutorIs it easier to toot orTo tutor two tooters to toot?
The woods rang with their laughter. Never had brother and sister heard such mirth-provoking sounds on the human tongue. Charley was obliged to roll on the ground and howl to relieve his breast of its weight of fun. Nahnya's low, liquid laughter was like celestial music in Ralph's ears. The desire was well-nigh insupportable in his breast to start Charley rolling down the bank with a thrust of the foot, and turning over to seize her in his arms and stop her laughing mouth with kisses.
They issued from under their mosquito bars to behold a scene as delicately bright as sunrise in fairyland. The sun shone through the green-hung corridor of the stream full in their faces, and the silkily eddying water caught at its level rays as if strings of diamonds were stretched across from bank to bank and gently agitated. To the dark trunks of the pine forest on either hand the fairies had pinned fantastic banners of fairy gold leaf. Nahnya and Ralph looked at it, and looking at each other, shared their pleasure without the necessity of speaking. To Ralph the sight of Nahnya was like the very Spirit of Morning making him over anew.
As they sat after breakfast charmed by the beauty of it, a full-grown moose rounded the bend upstream and came splashing unconcernedly toward their camp, his noble, ugly head and his racer limbs outlined against the golden mist. He carried his heavy head with a lowering pride, and stepped like a monarch. His antlers, that amazing extravagance of nature, were just now half-grown, and gloved in bloomy velvet.
Ralph, who like most men had always thought of himself as a hunter, felt a thrill at the sight of the kingly creature there in his fitting place, antipathetic to the thought of slaughter. And when Charley, quick as a woods creature himself, turned and snaked himself soundlessly toward his gun, a little sound of compunction escaped the white man.
Slight as it was, the moose heard, stopped, flung up his head, and like a released arrow leapt up the bank, and disappeared through the woods. Ralph was glad of his escape. Charley scowled sidewise at the white man, and swore under his breath in good English.
When they reëmbarked in the dugout, Ralph did not ask again for a paddle, but seated himself as before, facing Nahnya, where he could feast his eyes on her. It was a day among days; the river flowed like a song of summer, like a day-long symphony of life at the flood; andante where they were borne smoothly under the brown-carpeted banks and athwart the golden open spaces; adagio crossing the still black pools hemmed around with sombre pines; and scherzo in the jolly rapids. All nature joined in the concert, swelling and trembling with the life flood until the human hearts in the orchestra vibrated like violins almost to the pitch of pain. More especially one heart of the trio. It was too strong a dose for Ralph. He was filled with a delicate intoxication that made his eyes as bright and irresponsible as a faun's. He was not aware himself of the subtle changes working within him. Borne away on the crest of the flood, he lost the sense of his own identity. Nature had her way with him, undermining all his defences before he took the alarm. Civilization, being out of sight, passed out of mind. All his ideas of right and wrong were sloughed off like an old skin, revealing him no more than a young creature of the woods face to face with the woman he desired. Both young men sang and shouted on the way, and talked loud, foolish talk.
Nahnya gave no sign of being aware of Ralph's ardent glances, but when they started again, after the first spell on shore, she coolly commanded him to turn around, and handed him a paddle. Thereafter Ralph worked his passage.
There were times when the forest drew back, and the river flowed through shining meadows elevated a little above the travellers' heads. In one such place Charley suddenly turned, and holding up a warning hand, pointed to a spot ashore. Nahnya immediately brought the canoe around in a graceful sweep, and they clung to a bush at the water's edge under the place the boy had pointed out.
Ralph was at a loss to understand the move. At first he could hear nothing; their senses were better trained than his. Finally the sound of a long sigh came to him, and a soft rolling in the grass above. A heavier sigh followed, a long-drawn complaining breath ending in a bass groan, and then the sound of a heavy body struggling to its feet, all very like a man of over fourteen stone reluctantly taking up the day's burdens.
Nahnya touched Ralph's shoulder and pointed to his camera. He trained it on the spot.
Suddenly through the grass, no more than ten feet from Ralph, stuck a hairy head as big as a butter-tub. It was an immense brown bear. His breath was almost in their faces; they could have whacked him with their paddles. For an appreciable instant he gazed at them, his ears pricked, his chops fallen, his little, short-sighted eyes agog with comic dismay. Ralph snapped the shutter of his camera, and the three youngsters broke simultaneously into a roar of laughter. With a terrified snort the bear disappeared. For a long time they could hear him galloping desperately away through the grass.
"Why didn't Charley want to shoot him?" asked Ralph.
"Skin no good in the summer," said Nahnya. "Bear meat much tough."
The little river was not yet done with its surprises. By and by without any warning it carried them around a point of the elevated meadow, and they found themselves out on the bosom of a lake, whose unexpected serene loveliness caught at the breast. Woods and hills receded into the background, and the whole sky was revealed to them, with the expanse of water reflecting it. The sky was of the colour of the first forget-me-nots of spring, with the exquisite limpid clarity that is the North's especial beauty. Afterward a breeze came from across the lake darkening the pale surface of the water to corn-flower colour, bluer than blue.
After some talk in Cree between Nahnya and Charley they landed on the point of a promontory halfway down the lake. There was searching of tracks along the shore and more discussion mystifying to Ralph; it was not yet time to spell for another meal. Charley snatched up his gun and set off into the woods. Instantly Ralph's heart leaped into his throat, and the blood began to pound against his temples. He was left alone with her!
"Where has he gone?" he asked, affecting a careless air.
"Moose tracks," she said, pointing. "Moose come down here to drink. We want fresh meat."
"Will he be long?" asked Ralph.
She shrugged as at a foolish question. "How can I tell what the moose will do?"
Nahnya with provoking coolness procured a piece of moosehide from her stores in the dugout, and taking a pair of Charley's old moccasins, sat down on a boulder to resole them. Ralph, struggling to hide the fire that was consuming him, watched her with side-long, burning eyes. The lake with its strip of stony beach was at their feet; the forest climbed a stony hill behind them.
Nahnya's attitude, bending over her work, was like all her attitudes—instinct with an unconscious wild grace. She was all woman. Ralph felt like a desert traveller compelled to sit down outside the oasis. He was parched and fainting for her. She was in his blood: since yesterday he had lost himself.
The quality of deep wistfulness in her face tugged at his breast. It was there even when she laughed, and most there when she sat as now, occupied and still. Her calm busyness raised a wall between them. How to rouse her! how to make her feel what he felt! Like every passionate lover, he could not but believe that she must be susceptible to his torments.
"She's only acting, with her cool and indifferent airs," he thought, persuaded of the truth of it by his own feverish desires. "Girls think they have to make out they don't care. She's waiting for me to make a move. Maybe she sent Charley away to give me a chance."
But his tongue was still tied, and his arms paralyzed by the spectre of the deft needle.
"Nahnya," he said shakily at last, "can't you talk to me?"
She smiled without looking up. "I not much for talking," she said. "What about?"
"You," he said.
She shrugged. "Me?" she said. "That's nothing!"
"You said when you knew me better you'd tell me about yourself."
The needle paused. She looked disconcerted, and frowned. "I can't talk," she said slowly, "just to be talking. Talking is foolish. It makes trouble. You never can tell what will be said before you are through talking."
Ralph in his right mind would have laughed and commended her sound sense. Now he waved it aside. "You said you'd tell me about yourself," he repeated.
She pointed toward the dugout. "Your paddle is rough," she said. "Take a knife and make the end smooth to fit the hand. Working is good sense."
"I won't be put off like this!" cried Ralph hotly.
Temper was never an effective weapon to use with Nahnya.
She looked at him, scornful and disinterested as a child. "Put off? What's the matter with you?"
Passion could not withstand that look, open and cold as a deep spring. Ralph scowled and muttered, and dug up the stones with his toe.
After a while he returned to the charge with a more ingratiating manner. "I want to know something about you so that we can be friends," he said.
"What do you mean by friends?" she asked with another direct look.
Once more he had the feeling of the ground being cut from under him. "Oh, friends!" he said vaguely. "Friends like to be together, and tell each other everything, and help each other out."
"Can a white man be friends with a girl—like me?" she asked quietly. "I never saw that."
The unexpected implied truth flicked Ralph on the raw. He had no recourse but to lose his temper. "What have other men and girls got to do with you and me?" he cried hotly. "Am I the same to you as Joe Mixer and that lot?"
"Joe Mixer is always the same," she said. "He is easy to understand."
Ralph chose to see coquetry in this. "Is that the sort of man you like?" he cried.
"No," she said. "But I know what to expect from him."
Her admirable good sense and directness were lost on him. Passion found its voice. "Nahnya, do you want to drive me mad? You know what I'm feeling! I couldn't sleep a wink last night for listening to you breathing so softly inside your tent. I want you! I'm mad with wanting you!"
She sprang up, and warily put the rock between them. The quiet eyes fired up with surprising suddenness. "Stop it!" she cried. "You talk foolish! You gone crazy, I think!"
"You drove me crazy!" he cried. "You're so beautiful! What did you expect? Nahnya, it's summer time! You're no snow-woman with those carnations in your cheeks—those lips! Come to me, Nahnya. Don't fight me any more!"
Anger made lightnings in her eyes. "Stop it!" she cried, stamping her foot. Her voice rang like steel. "What do you know about me, what I am? What do you care? It is fine summer time and you want a woman!"
"It's not true!" he cried, moving toward her around the rock. "I want only you!"
She evaded him. "It is true!" she cried ringingly. "You not know me! I am not a coat to be worn by different men until I am old! I am no man's woman to work for him and crouch before him like his dog! I am myself—me! Nahnya Crossfox!"
He did not take in the sense of her words, but only saw that she was twice as beautiful when angry. "I don't care what you are," he muttered. "I want you!"
"Don't you touch me!" she cried warningly.
He had already sprung toward her. She gave back one step, and swung her flexed arm swift as a cat's-paw. There was a resounding smack and Ralph's cheek whitened and crimsoned.
He stopped in his tracks. In his eyes blank surprise was succeeded by red fury. For an instant they stood thus at gaze, with heaving breasts and stormy eyes.
"Keep away!" she said through her teeth.
"You devil!" he muttered. "I meant fair by you. I'll have you now anyway!"
She turned and sped up the hill. Ralph clutched at her, but her flying skirts only teased his finger-tips. He leaped after her, passion and an outrageous anger lending springs to his heels. A strange elation, too, formed part of the boiling mess in his brain. She chose to run; very well then, let her take the penalty of capture.
Darting and twisting among the birch trees, chin up and elbows pressed close to her sides, Nahnya ran as if upon a hundred feet. Ralph with the expenditure of three times the effort was no match for her. He could not twist his bulk among the trees so featly, nor leap so nimbly up from stone to stone. To be beaten by a girl was unthinkable. Grinding his teeth, putting his head down, he strained every nerve to overtake her. But she distanced him still. At the top of the hill he lost sight of her, nor could he any longer hear her flying moccasined feet among the leaves and sticks.
What with the race uphill, and the unconscionable commotion inside him, the burden was almost too much for a mortal heart. Ralph dropped on a stone, and pressed his head between his hands. There was a pretty mess inside it; to be scorned by a savage maiden, to have his face slapped—hideous insult—and to have her get away scot free! Something inside him seemed to writhe and turn over with rage.
He got up presently, and took his way downhill again with a black brow. "She's got to go back to the boat," he reflected grimly. "I'll get her there!"
As he issued out from among the trees he saw her. She was awaiting him by the waterside, cool and wary. At the sight of her his heart leaped up with an irresponsible, mad desire. No faun of earth's youth was more cruel, ardent, untamed, and joyous than this young doctor of the universities who had forgotten his past.
"By God! she's beautiful! And she's going to be mine!" his eyes cried.
"Keep away!" she said warningly.
He laughed, and ran toward her.
He could never have described exactly what happened. He saw her stoop swiftly, and sensed the stick that she caught up, without being able to stop himself. He heard the crack on his head that he did not feel, and night spread her black pinions with a swoop over the summer noon.
Ralph came to his senses to find himself lying in the bottom of the dugout, propped against folded blankets. A little in front of him he could see Charley's indifferent back, and Charley's arms rhythmically driving the paddle. Craning his neck to see if Nahnya was behind him, a most convincing, grinding pain from the crown of his head down through his spinal column arrested the movement. He closed his eyes, and lay quiet while it spent itself.
He became conscious of a sickening weight on his breast. Little by little recollection returned, explaining it. Life seemed like an ugly task to take up. To be flouted and scorned and knocked down by the woman he desired—a red woman into the bargain! He reflected bitterly that she must have told Charley what had happened. Ralph had a mental picture of the red-skin's shrug, and of being thrown contemptuously into the dugout. A deep, slow rage burned in his breast like a charcoal fire, poisoning his whole being with its fumes.
"If he shows anything in his face when he turns around, I'll smash him!" thought Ralph. "It would do me good to smash his sulky brown face. They shan't laugh at me, damn them!"
To add to the confusion inside him a little voice would make itself heard saying: "Served you right, old man! She's a good girl. She did just the right thing. You acted like a beast!"
This was what really maddened Ralph more than the recollection of his injuries. While he lay there so quietly with his eyes closed, inside him, so to speak, he was trying to shout down that damnable, persistent small voice.
"Ignorant, dull savages! Scum of the earth! How dare they set themselves up against a white man? I'll show them! I've been too friendly with them. Their heads are swelled. I'll put them in their places!"
By and by Nahnya asked: "You feel better now?"
He made believe to be still unconscious.
Leaning forward, she laid two cool fingers on the pulse of his temple. At her touch a keen discomfort filled him; pleasure or disgust?—he could not have told.
By this time they had crossed the lake, and the swiftly passing banks of the river were pressing close on them again. They turned innumerable bends, shot little rapids, and loitered across still pools as before. But the lyrical beauty of the summer's afternoon had departed. Ralph hated it. By and by he lost the river banks, and raising his head he saw that they had come out upon another lake. After what seemed to him like an age consumed in crossing it, they entered the river once more, and finally landed.
Not until they went ashore did Ralph have a glimpse of Nahnya's face. He avoided looking at her as long as he could. In equal degrees he longed and dreaded to find out what she was thinking. When finally his angry, sullen eyes crept sidewise to her face—if she had looked sorry! but no, it was the same old, hard, indifferent mask that fronted him. His unreasonable anger welled up afresh.
"All right, my girl!" he thought. "I'll pay you out yet!"
It was one of the customary camping-places on the river. On each side the fireplace a post had been driven in the earth and a bar laid across, from which depended wooden hooks of various lengths to hang the pails from. Some altruistic traveller had even made a rustic table and a bench for those who were to follow him.
According to their customary routine, they first slung the three little mosquito tents in a row, and then, making a fire, set about preparing supper. There was little speech exchanged between them. It was widely different from the jolly scene of the night before. The matter-of-fact Charley accepted the silence as he had accepted the fun, without question. Ralph could not tell from his expressionless face how much he knew of what had happened. The struggle inside Ralph was keeping his raw susceptibilities agitated as by the application of sandpaper. He was spoiling for a quarrel.
Charley, climbing the bank with a load from the boat, spoke a word over his shoulder to Ralph, who was beside the dugout: "Pakwishegan."
Ralph violently exploded. "If flour is wanted, carry it up yourself!" he cried with an oath. "Who do you think you are, giving orders to a white man!"
The boy looked at him astonished. Putting down his load, he came back for the bag of flour. Ralph went up empty-handed. At the top of the bank he met Nahnya, drawn by the sound of his angry voice.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"Matter!" cried Ralph. "I suppose you and your brother think you can put it all over me now, don't you? Well you've got another guess!"
It was no sooner out than he wondered what had made him say it. Her astonished eyes reproached him. After a moment's blank regard she seemed to understand, and her face changed.
"You foolish," she said swiftly. "I not tell Charley anything. He only a boy, not much sense yet. I tell him you fall down and hit your head on a stone."
It took him aback. He looked at her dumbly and miserably, but his evil genius applied the lash once more. "I don't care what you tell him!" he cried loudly. He strode to his tent, and lifting the netting, rolled himself in his blankets, and made believe to go to sleep.
The voice was more insistent than ever. "You fool!" it said. "She's generous! She's trying to spare you. You gave yourself away nicely. You're in the wrong. You're acting like a spoiled child, and every minute that passes without your owning up makes it worse!"
Whereat the other party was obliged to shout louder than ever: "I don't care! Ignorant, senseless redskins! What a fool I was to put myself in their hands! I'll make them smart for this!"
He had no supper. By and by he did fall asleep. In the middle of the night he awoke sore and hungry. Further sleep was out of the question. Getting up, he replenished the dying fire. When the flames leaped up, making the little place bright, to save himself he could not help glancing in the direction of Nahnya's little shelter. It was empty.
A swift anxiety seized him. Under the next shelter Charley was sleeping peacefully. Where could she have gone alone at that time of night? Everything about her was so mysterious! Could any danger have overtaken her without awaking him? Perhaps some of her people were camped in the neighbourhood—a man, maybe! At this thought a surprising pain transfixed Ralph's breast.
He thought of the boat, and went stumblingly down the bank to see if it was there. At the bottom of the incline he almost fell over Nahnya. She was lying in the grass with her face hidden in her arms.
Ralph was utterly confused by the discovery. For a moment he stood staring down at her like a clown. "What does it mean?" he thought dully. Her stillness began to frighten him.
"Nahnya!" he whispered sharply.
"Go back to your tent," she muttered.
The words came quick and breathless from her. Ralph put a hand on her shoulder and felt it shake. At that something tight and painful in his own breast snapped in two, and the warm feelings he had done his best to keep out had their way. He dropped to his knees beside her.
"Nahnya, what is it?" he whispered in a voice clumsy and faltering with feeling. "It's not because of me, is it? I'm not worth it. I acted like a brute and a fool. I'm sorry! I've been sorry ever since, but I couldn't get it out!"
She made no effort to control her weeping now. The sound was like little knives hacking at his breast. He longed to take her up in his arms, but a truer instinct warned him not to touch her now.
"Nahnya, don't, don't!" he implored. "You have nothing to feel badly for. I forgot myself. I am ashamed. You make me feel like the lowest worm that crawls."
Gradually her weeping stilled itself. She sat up at last and pressed the back of her hand to her eyes. "I am a fool," she said, "crying like a baby."
There was a deprecating, small, friendly note in her voice that Ralph had never heard before. He had much ado to keep his hands off her. "Why should you feel badly?" he persisted. "You have done nothing but what was right."
"Oh, I think everything goes wrong," she said wistfully. "I think there is a curse upon me that turns men into devils when they look at me. Always wherever I go men act bad to me. What is the matter with me, I think, that makes them bad? I do not know."
"It's not your fault if you are beautiful," he muttered, "and if men have devils in them."
"I do not know," she repeated.
The storm of weeping had left her with a gentleness she had never shown before. She was as friendly as a lonely child. Ralph was terrified of breaking the spell. His tongue stumbled along in incoherent self-reproaches.
"When I come to you at Fort Edward," Nahnya went on, "I think much; are you the same as the other men. I watch you close. I think you have different feelings, and I am glad. I want so much for you to be different. And yesterday we have so much fun. You look at me straight and laugh cleanly. I am sure it is all right. But to-day"—her voice drooped—"to-day you are like all the others!"
"Nahnya, forgive me! I'm ashamed!" he muttered.
"To-night I am thinking what will I do," she continued. "We can't go on together in the same canoe if the devil is roused in you. I feel so bad. I have come so far to get you to cure my mot'er. I think it is no use! Then I cry like a fool!"
"Nahnya, I swear I'll never give you cause again," said Ralph. "Try to believe me! I swear I'll never lay a hand on you except in respect!"
She let him take her hand. He pressed it to his lips. At the act she caught her breath oddly, and snatched the hand away. Poor Ralph thought he had offended her again. There was a silence between them. At length she said very low:
"Ralph, do you think I am a bad woman?"
Ralph almost grovelled at her feet. It was very sweet to her. She listened to his desperate protestations with a hand at her breast, and made no attempt to stay him. When she spoke again her voice was as soft and as charged with feeling as a nightingale's. All she said was:
"It is getting light in the east. We must go to our beds."
On the first day of the journey Ralph, according to the immemorial instinct of travellers, started a diary, and illustrated it with rough day to day maps. He wrote it up by the campfire during the long twilights, or while they basked in the sun at the noon spell. Charley never noticed it, but whenever the little black book was produced Nahnya looked curious and oddly annoyed. But she could not very well order Ralph to give it up.
On the afternoon of the day following Ralph's outbreak and their midnight reconciliation her curiosity finally found vent in speech. Passing down the largest of the lakes a strong head wind had blown up, and after struggling against it for a couple of hours, and thoroughly wetting themselves and their baggage without making much progress, Nahnya had ordered a landing. They now lay in rustling grass on a point of land blown upon by the strong fresh wind, and deliciously warmed by the sun. Charley had fallen asleep. When Ralph brought out the diary Nahnya said:
"What do you write in your little book?"
"Just what we see every day," said Ralph.
Nahnya frowned a little. "You promise me you never tell what you see," she said.
"I never will," said Ralph quickly. "No one but myself shall ever read this."
"Maybe some one find it," said Nahnya. "What good is your promise then?"
"It is written in shorthand," he said, exhibiting it. "No one can read it but me."
She was mollified. "It is like the Cree writing that the missionaries teach," she said. "Read it to me," she added with a kind of shy boldness.
Ralph was nothing loath. It was his matter-of-fact self that guided the pencil. "Estimate it seventy-five miles from Hat Lake to Beaver Lake," he began. "Probably less than half that in a straight line, because the river is as crooked as a corkscrew. Called the second lake Beaver Lake because of the hills to the west; a medium size hill for the head, a big hill for the body, and a long, low hill for the tail."
"That is a good name," interrupted Nahnya.
"Couldn't see the whole of Beaver Lake at once, but you head straight down the lake from point to point; then about twenty miles more of river to Breeches Lake. It's shaped like a pair of breeches. As you start down it a long, thin point faces you almost dividing it in two. Nothing doing in the left leg; the right leg goes through. The water of all the lakes is amber coloured, but black as onyx when you look straight down. It's great to see the shores without a tree chopped down, or a house anywhere to spoil the natural effect.
"The river is full of mother wild ducks and their newly hatched families. Comical little puff-balls. Hell to pay when we come along. Old Mis' Duck she plays every trick she knows to lead us away from the family, and the babies they just keep on diving till they are too tired to wiggle their tails any more."
Nahnya laughed.
"Can't tell which way you're going in the river, but all the lakes stretch north and south, so I figure we're travelling due north. Charley bent a piece of tin like a trolling spoon and caught a thumping salmon trout. They call itsapi. Best fish I ever tasted. I call the fourth lake Sword Lake; it's long and narrow and straight, with a bend at the top like a handle. There are hills both sides all the way—bluest I ever saw. We are camped on the point at the beginning of the bend and I can't see what's around it."
"This McIlwraith Lake," said Nahnya.
Ralph made the entry.
"Is that all?" she asked.
"That's all," he said.
"Nothing about me?" she said, archly smiling and wistful, affecting a great surprise.
Ralph, avoiding her eye, shook his head. It was the truth. He could not bare his heart concerning Nahnya, even to the discreet little book.
"Why do you write it?" Nahnya asked.
"Oh, when you take a bully trip you like to have a record of it—to read when you are old, I suppose."
"When you are old I think you will laugh at this," Nahnya said, looking away.
"Think so?" said Ralph.
Half-measures were impossible to Nahnya. When she was on her guard a wall was no stonier; when she gave her confidence she gave it all. To-day her eyes were as open and affectionate as a child's; there was gratitude in their wistful depths, a hint of humility. This in the same girl who had beaten Ralph about the head only the day before!
Ralph, without altogether understanding the change in her, was touched and thrilled by her look. Alas! for his good resolutions. It had been easy the night before under stress of emotion to swear he would never touch her, never alarm her by his passion. He dimly understood that it was her reliance on his promise that made her so free with him to-day, and yet—his arms ached for her a hundred times more than before, and when in the business about camp they accidentally touched each other, the same old unregenerate madness made his brain reel.
Tossed between two thoughts, he was happy and he was miserable. "Shedoescare! She couldn't look at me like that if she didn't! No! She only looks like that because she feels safe from my love-making!"
This was the undercurrent; on the surface all was serene. The combination of strong, cool wind and hot sunshine was delicious. Nahnya was soling the same pair of moccasins, while Ralph, more tractable to-day, shaped and smoothed the handle of his paddle with a knife. Nahnya developed a faculty for asking questions.
"How long you live in Fort Edward, Ralph?"
The initial "R" was difficult for her tongue to encompass. She delicately aspirated his name thus, "Hoo-ralph." He thought the sound of it enchanting.
"Six weeks."
"You like it there?"
"Dull as ditch-water."
"They tell me plenty fun at Fort Edward."
"Not my kind of fun."
"Plenty girls."
"Girls? Lord! Frights!"
"I suppose you like outside fun better, waltz-dancing and high-toned girls and all."
"Society, you mean? I never was much for that."
"Where did you live before you came to Fort Edward?"
"New York, last, working in a hospital."
"I know hospitals. They have good times. The doctors go out with the nurses."
"Not this doctor. Nurses are too—too iodoformy."
"What's that, Ralph?"
"Oh, too professional."
"Some nurses are sweet."
"I never had any luck that way."
"What you do when you go out in New York?"
"Oh, hang round with the fellows, and go to shows. I never had any money."
Nahnya, very intent on her sewing: "Did you know any of the actresses?"
"Lord! No! Not my style at all!"
"Didn't you know any girls in New York?"
"Nary a one!"
"That is too bad! But at your other college you have fun?"
"McGill, yes, plenty doing there."
"Nice girls?"
"Rather! Plenty of 'em. Dear little things!"
A pause here while Nahnya bit the thread with her sharp teeth, and took up the other moccasin. "What is plenty?" she said with a little air of scorn. "There is always one."
"Not for me," Ralph said. "I rushed the bunch."
"Where was your home, Ralph; where you were born?"
"At Millersville in Ontario. One of those sleepy little burgs with a brick Odd Fellows' Hall with blue shades, a Royal Hotel on the corner, and cracked cement sidewalks. They're all alike."
"Ralph never guessed he was being searched through and through by a woman's loving, jealous curiosity""Ralph never guessed he was being searched through and through by a woman's loving, jealous curiosity"
Nahnya had a score of questions to ask about his home and his family. Ralph, as his eyes softened with recollection, grew more outrageously facetious. Nahnya, glancing at him through her lashes, understood. Finally, threading a needle with an elaborately careless air, she remarked:
"I guess you liked the Millersville girls best."
"Print dresses and rosy cheeks," said Ralph dreamily. "Short on fine clothes and long on health and good nature! Choir practice and school picnics and country dances! That was good! There was a girl there——"
"Ah!"
"Patty Lake her name was. We called her Pattycake. She was sweet. Always wore pink, and had two fat, brown braids hanging down her back."
"Well?" a little breathlessly.
"Married the butcher's boy, that's all."
There were many breaks and pauses in this conversation. So off-hand was Nahnya's manner, and such her preoccupation with the needle, that Ralph never guessed he was being searched through and through by a woman's loving, jealous curiosity.
The little black book continued:
"When we left our grassy point and paddled around the big curve in McIlwraith Lake, suddenly we hove in sight of half a dozen whitewashed huts on the shore. And a flag-pole with a flag against the blue! Gave me a regular thrill. The Hudson's Bay Company uses the Union Jack with the letters H.B.C. in white. The fellows up here say it stands for 'Here Before Christ.' As we paddled by, a white man came out of the store and hailed us. Nahnya wouldn't stop. 'Ask too much questions,' she said. This was Fort McIlwraith that I have heard of.
"Immediately afterward we got in the river again. It is deeper and swifter after every lake. Here it is called the Pony River, Nahnya says. There were some ugly snags. Nahnya is a wonder with the paddle. We camped in the middle of a wide, burned-over stretch. It was like a farm-field. You kept looking around for fences and cattle, and a house somewhere.
"Next morning the river slowed up and lost itself among a lot of low islands covered with gigantic cottonwood trees. You could see there was a change coming. As we paddled around the end of an island, me all unawares, we were snatched up—snatched is the word—by a violent green current that raced us down half a mile, and wet us in a rapid before I got my bearings.
"Nahnya says this is the Rice River. It is half a dozen times as big as the Pony. It is a thick, yellowish-green colour like jade, and a funny hissing sound comes up from the surface. Nahnya says it is made by the stones chasing along the stony bottom. It is a gaunt, ragged, bad-tempered looking stream, always gnawing under its banks and bringing the trees down on the run, and then piling the debris in untidy heaps on naked pebble bars in the middle. The cut-banks are astonishing—some of them a hundred feet high, the trees looking like toys along the top edge, waiting their turn to fall over. Out of these smooth slopes, naked as railway embankments, harder strata of earth stick up like castles, with millions of swallows building in them.
"We camped in another burned-out place. This is the loneliest spot on earth almost, and even here man has left his dirty work. The man, red or white, who is responsible for a fire ought to be drawn and quartered. It's ghastly. Nahnya has put the fear of God into Charley. Last thing before we move on she makes him haul water until every spark is quenched. Mosquitoes bad to-night.
"Couldn't sleep. This violent, ugly river, and the ghastly burned-over country, and other things gave me the willies. A brute of a bird flew in circles over the tent half the night, uttering a single croaking note like a cracked funeral bell. Lord! we're a long way off from folks! Fancy Charley and Nahnya taking these trips by themselves. She sleeps like a baby, without ever moving or missing a breath.
"Next day. The old river doesn't look so bad with the sun shining on it. Saw three bears as we went flying down. How does anybody get up this current I wonder. You can't always be going down-stream. Nothing but cut-banks, bars, drift-piles, and vicious little rapids on the bends. Eagles sailing like aeroplanes overhead, and screaming as if they had steel springs in their throats.
"Third day on the Rice River. We have come nearly two hundred miles on this stream, I guess, and not a soul, red or white, not a hut, nor the remains of a hut all the way. The current seems to be slackening, and we lose ourselves in a mess of islands; so I suppose there is something saving for us ahead. This is the sixth day from Gisborne, so we ought to arrive there to-morrow, wherever and whatever 'there' is."
The entries in the little black book ended with these words.
Ralph's diary confined itself discreetly to the visual aspects of the journey, avoiding the psychological. All was not smooth sailing here of course. Ralph was keeping a tight hold on himself that entailed no little nervous strain, and he was apt to break out unreasonably. Nahnya, while generally friendly, had an exasperating way of relapsing at any time into the mysterious inscrutability which maddened him. Only Charley was always the same.
On the afternoon of the third day on the Rice River, after one of the colloquies in Cree with her brother that always irritated Ralph, Nahnya suddenly brought the dugout around in the current, and grounded it on a shelving, stony beach. Charley got out and pulled it up.
"What's this for?" said Ralph, surprised. "It isn't but an hour since we ate."
Nahnya affected not to hear him.
Ralph instantly flew into a passion. "Oh, very well!" he cried. "If you want to be mysterious!"
He strode off and sat down by himself on a drift-log, dignified and sore. He filled his pipe with care, and lighted it. It tasted bad, and he put it back in his pocket.
Nahnya brought cold victuals ashore, and she and Charley sat down together. Ralph, watching out of the corner of his eye, had at least the satisfaction of seeing that she could not eat. She sat with her hands in her lap, unusual for her. He could not see her face. Charley, who could always eat, stuffed himself with moose-meat and cold bannock.
When Charley had eaten as much as he could hold, he carried the remains back to the dugout and put them away. He returned to Nahnya with a coil of light, strong cord in his hands, a tracking-line. Holding it out toward her, he said something in Cree.
To Ralph's astonishment Nahnya sprang up in a rage, snatched the line out of Charley's hands, and soundly boxed his ears. A pretty family quarrel resulted. Charley, thunderstruck at first, answered back in tones of resentful injury. More than once Ralph heard his own name, and wondered mightily what he had to do with it.
Charley flung off, and sat down by himself, and there were the three of them up and down the beach, perfectly sore and unhappy; Ralph in addition mystified by it all.
Ralph was the first to give in. "Oh, I say, this is too ridiculous!" he cried. "Nahnya, come here!"
She went to him with a face like a mask of bronze.
"What's the matter, Nahnya?" he demanded to know. "We're all acting like children!"
She shrugged slightly, and looked away.
Seeing that he would get nothing out of her this way, he changed his tone. "For my part I'm sorry I lost my temper," he said warmly. "Honest, I am."
This told. She frowned and looked uncomfortable; sure sign, as he knew by now, that her feelings were touched.
"We were always going to be friends," he said, following up his advantage. "Is this being friends? What's the matter, Nahnya?"
To his surprise he saw her eyes begin to fill. She made to turn from him, but he caught her wrists and forced her to face him. "Nahnya, I am your friend," he said.
She angrily shook the tears from her eyes. "I one fool!" she muttered. "Like a white woman, I cry when I need sense!"
"What's the matter?" repeated Ralph.
"Let me go!" she said.
He released her.
"I think you going to hate me by and by," she said.
"Why should I hate you?" he demanded.
She gave him an extraordinary look, at once determined and deprecating, and said a little breathlessly: "Ralph, I got to tie your eyes, now."
"Blindfold me?" cried Ralph, amazed. "What for?"
"You must not see where we go now."
"But I gave you my word!" cried Ralph. "I promised I'd say nothing of where I had been or of what I had seen."
"I know," she said, "you will keep your promise. But you must not come back yourself."
Ralph stared at her as if she were a witch. Thus to hit upon his secret intention, scarcely confessed to himself!
After a while she said: "Will you promise never to come back?"
"No!" cried Ralph, very red in the face. "I am a free agent!"
"Then I got to tie your eyes," she said.
"I won't submit to it!" cried Ralph hotly.
She shrugged and turned away. She gave an order to the sulky Charley, and between them they unloaded the dugout. Though it was scarcely four in the afternoon, the three little tents were set up in a row on top of the bank, and every preparation made for spending the night.
The mosquitoes soon drove them in, each under his own shelter, where they lay for the rest of the afternoon, sleeping, sulking, or sorrowing as the case was. They issued out for a hasty, silent supper and turned in again. There was a gorgeous, troubled sunset above the pines across the river, and afterward the evening star came out like a lighthouse in a canary sea with dark blue islands. The hard, swift face of the river mellowed in the fading light, and gleamed with the soft lustre of old, blue stained glass. None of those in the little tents gave any heed.
In the middle of the night Ralph was rudely awakened by the descent of two heavy knees between his shoulders. While he still struggled with the mists of sleep, his wrists were secured behind him. He put up the best fight he could, but his ankles were soon tied, too. Then it was easy to bandage his eyes.
Harder to bear than the indignity of bondage was the pain of betrayal that stabbed him.
"Is this your friendship?" he cried.
There was no answer out of the dark.
Ralph's struggle only exhausted him, and bruised his wrists and ankles. He gave it up, and lay outwardly quiet, seething with resentment, within. Deprived of his sight, his hearing became preternaturally acute, and he had no difficulty in following the various steps of their preparations for departure. Before the bandage was clapped on his eyes, he had had a glimpse of daylight. He guessed from the poignant freshness of the air in his nostrils that the dawn had just broken.
After the tent had been taken down over his head and carried away, Nahnya and Charley came back to him together. Charley lifted him under the arms, and Nahnya took his feet. Charley's manner of carrying him suggested an insulting indifference that caused Ralph to grind his teeth. They climbed cautiously down the steep bank, finishing with a sudden slide to the bottom, and almost dropping Ralph between them. Charley laughed, and Ralph swore savagely.
They laid him in the dugout, and he heard Charley's steps retreating. Nahnya was arranging the blankets under him.
"Ralph, I sorry," she said in a low voice, sharp with emotion. "I not know anything else to do."
It did not help matters any. He was too full of resentment to give a thought to her side of the case. "This is what I get for trying to do the square thing by you!" he cried. "For holding myself in night and day to keep from distressing you! You worked on my sympathies. You made me think you were on the square. You talked about friendship, and then you attacked me while I was asleep! Oh! I have been nicely taken in!"
He heard no more from her.
They slid the boat off the stones; Nahnya climbed over Ralph to take her place in the stern; and they set off in the current. For hours after that Ralph had nothing to go on but the quiet dip of the paddles, the answering leap of the boat to the thrust of their strong arms, and the drip of the water as the blades were withdrawn. Both brother and sister had a great capacity for silence.
Ralph's frame of mind was anything but an enviable one. It is not pleasant to a man to be confronted by a mystery in the woman he loves. As long as they had been in accord it had troubled him very little; he had looked in her clear eyes, thinking, "whatever may be in store, she's on the square." But when she turned against him all this was changed. Every look, word, act that he had not understood at the time recurred to him charged with a sinister significance. Wounded pride hatefully suggested to him that she was using his love for her to further her own ends.
Nevertheless he could not but admit that for such a hardy villainess some of her acts were strange. He had plenty of time to think things out. He remembered how she had boxed Charley's ears when the boy had first suggested tying him up; he remembered how her eyes had filled, and how sadly she whispered, "I think you going to hate me by and by." This suggested that she might be the victim of circumstances no less than himself. "Why can't she trust me a little?" he thought. "She knows I'd do anything for her!"
Behind all this was the mystery of what lay ahead, hanging like a heavy black curtain athwart his gaze. When a man has his eyes to see, and his arms to fight with, a mystery is pleasantly provocative and stimulating. When he lies blindfolded, bound, and helpless, the darkest apprehensions seize upon him. Thus the weary round continued in Ralph's mind.
The long silence was broken by Nahnya. She uttered in Cree what sounded like a quiet warning. Immediately afterward the dugout lurched violently as under a side blow, spun around, and went on as smoothly as before. For a long time Ralph lay vainly threshing his brain for an explanation of this odd shock.
A new sound slowly stole on his ears, a dull, heavy growl from down the river. He did not need to be told what this was; rapids—but no such rapids as they had shot in the Pony River, or hitherto in the Rice. Those compared with this sound were as the laughter of children to the voice of a giant. The growl became a roar which grew louder with every moment. Ralph's heart began to beat painfully. It is probable that it never occurred to Nahnya, certainly not to Charley, what a refined species of torture they were inflicting on their prisoner. There is no terror like terror of the unseen. "If anything happens I'll drown like a cat in a bag!" thought Ralph. He would not stoop to make any complaint aloud.
Charley and Nahnya stopped paddling, and talked low-voiced; Nahnya gave unmistakable orders. The slight, sharp note of excitement in their voices shook Ralph's breast. From the sounds ahead he pictured a very cataclysm of the waters awaiting them, wilder indeed than any earthly rapids. Little beads of perspiration broke out on his forehead. Oh! for his sight! the use of his arms! But he would not ask it. They started paddling again. The roaring seemed to be on every side of them now. Ralph clenched his teeth and his hands. "Now we're going to take the plunge!" he thought. "Now! Now!" And still it held off, until he could have screamed with the suspense.
And then the dugout seemed to drop from under him, and immediately afterward precipitated itself with a crash against a wall of water. A wave leaped aboard, drenching Ralph to the waist. He thought it was all over, and suddenly ceased to trouble. Charley yelled with pure excitement; the dugout gave a series of mad leaps and plunges, flinging Ralph from side to side like a sack of meal, and suddenly they floated in smooth water again. An uncanny stillness descended on them. A long breath escaped between Ralph's teeth.
There followed what seemed like the greater part of a day to Ralph, with scarcely anything to register the passing of the heavy time. It was perhaps four hours. The sunshine grew warm in his face, and he smelled the pines on shore. High overhead he heard the eagles screaming. Charley complained—of hunger, Ralph guessed, and Nahnya laconically silenced him. At intervals a new sound gave Ralph food for thought. This was the loud, brawling voice of a stream, now on one side, now on the other.
"The whole character of the country must have changed," he thought. "We must be passing between steep hills or mountains for the streams to come tumbling down like that."
The long wait for something to happen was ended by the voice of another great rapid ahead. Ralph's heart began to beat. "Must I go through with that again?" he thought.
But while he was steeling himself for the ordeal, the nose of the dugout grounded, and Charley, springing out, pulled her up on shore.
Ralph was lifted out and laid on a flat rock. There was a long wait. A very real hunger began to assail him. One of the brawling streams came down nearby. From the sounds that reached his ears, Ralph pictured the dugout being dragged across the rock on rollers, and hidden under bushes. Evidently their journey by water was at an end. Nahnya and Charley sat down near him, seemingly to make something. Finally Ralph was lifted up and laid down again, and then, much to his surprise, hoisted on a litter and borne away.
A long journey over rough ground followed, and all uphill, Ralph judged. They never passed out of hearing of the voice of the small stream. They stopped often to rest. Even so, it was wonderful to Ralph how easily they went. He was no light-weight. Once or twice Charley grumbled at taking up the load, and Nahnya angrily silenced him. There was no faltering in her. In spite of his resentment against her Ralph felt a kind of compunction at being carried by a woman. Anyway, his resentment had cooled somewhat; cooled enough to allow him to glance at the oddity of his situation.
"Lord! here's a queer go!" he thought. "What next?"
He was not under any apprehensions of danger to himself.
They went on for an hour or more, and the question of food became of more vital moment to Ralph than of what was before him. The air had the lack of motion and the cool smell of vegetable decay that suggested a deep forest. Finally he was put down for a longer period, and he heard the welcome sound of Charley's axe, and shortly afterward the crackle of the growing fire. In a little while the delicious emanation from baking bannock reached his nostrils, and at last he heard the hissing of the bacon in the pan, which signified the completion of the preparations. A certain anxiety attacked him.
"How the deuce are they going to manage about feeding me?" he thought. "By Gad! if they think they're going to make me go without my dinner——!"
However, Charley presently untied his ankles and his wrists. Ralph tore the bandage from his eyes, stretched himself luxuriously, and looked about him.
They were in the magnificent gloom of a primeval forest. Gigantic trunks of fir and spruce rose on every hand with lofty branches that darkened the heavens. The little patches of sky that showed between seemed immeasurably far off. The fallen monarchs of ages past lay here and there in confusion, rotting by infinitesimally slow degrees. The ground was stony, but stones and fallen trunks alike were largely covered with moss, incredibly soft and thick and green. The moss masked treacherous holes, as Ralph discovered when he attempted to move about. There was no undergrowth except a few spindling berry-bushes, and a low plant with huge leaves called the "devil's club," both pale from lack of sunlight.