Part 3

She had spread a piece of canvas on the deck, and lay wrapped in a gray blanket, her head pillowed on her outflung arm. Her face, slightly turned up, was revealed under the light, calm and partly smiling in sleep. The hard, watchful look that had so often nonplussed him during the day had disappeared. Once again he was compelled to rearrange all his impressions of her.

"She's only a kid!" he thought tenderly. He had not presumed to take the protective attitude toward her before.

Her long, curved lashes swept her dusky cheeks; her lips were a little parted as if in expectation; the hand that was flung out toward him lay palm upward, the fingers bent, as if mutely asking for a comrade hand. Abandoned to sleep as she lay, there was something at once appealing and holy in her aspect: something that made his whole being yearn over her, and that caused him to draw back outside the door.

He could not bear to look at her. A feeling he could not have named made him return to the forward deck. He turned up his face to the night sky, and let his heart quiet down. The essence of the poetry of womanhood had been shown to him, and the starry night thrilled with the wonder of it. In a flash there was revealed to him a new understanding of all the love-poems he had ever read, and perhaps secretly despised.

"She sleeps like a lily on the water," he murmured to himself without the least shame.

By and by, prose reasserting itself, he began to reflect upon what he should do next. "If I go back to the fire I'll surely fall asleep," he thought. "But if I lie down here nobody can disturb her without waking me first."

Procuring his blankets from beside the fire, he made his bed on the deck in such a position that any one seeking the open door must step over his body. There he waited for sleep, dwelling with rapt tenderness on the sight he had seen, graving it lovingly on his subconsciousness for a shrine that he might revisit as long as consciousness endured. He drifted away to the accompaniment of the distant drumming of a partridge in the woods.

Suddenly he found himself wide awake without being able to tell what had aroused him. The campfire was now black out, and nothing but a blacker shadow was visible toward the shore. He waited a little breathlessly for confirmation of the alarm he had received. Finally the plank to the shore creaked under a heavy weight, and Ralph became aware of a looming figure. He sat up.

The figure stopped at the edge of the deck. "Who's there?" came in Joe Mixer's thick voice, quick with alarm.

"Cowdray," said Ralph coolly.

"What the hell are you doing here?"

Ralph sprang up, kicking his legs free of the entangling blanket. "What the hell are you after?" he retorted.

"I don't have to account to you," snarled Joe.

There was a silence. They stood with clenched fists, straining their eyes to take each other's measure in the dark.

Evidently Joe thought better of his truculence, for when he spoke again it was in conciliatory tones. "Gad! You give me a start to see you rise up like that! I thought I had 'em! You shouldn't scare a man to death before you knock him down, Doc!"

Joe's greasy obsequiousness was more offensive to Ralph than his anger. He remained silent.

"When the fire went out I woke up cold," Joe went on plausibly. "I come aboard to get me a sweater out of my bag."

Ralph was not deceived. The thought of Joe's evil, swimming little eyes profaning the picture of the sleeping girl inside, by so much as looking at her, filled him with a cold, unreasonable rage, and he was ready to go to any lengths to prevent it. At the same time he reflected that it would serve her better to avoid a fight, if he could, and he put his wits to work.

"Take one of my blankets," he said. "I have more than I need!"

Joe demurred. They argued the matter with sarcastic politeness on both sides. Each was aware that the other saw through his game.

Ralph soon tired of it. "Very well, if you want to go in there, you go by the front door, see?" he said shortly.

Joe knew as well as Ralph that the screech of the door would awaken her before he got in. "What's the matter with you?" snarled Joe.

"What's the use of beating around the bush?" retorted Ralph. "I tell you straight I won't allow that girl to be bothered."

"_You_ won't let her be bothered!" sneered Joe. "Holy mackerel, listen to what's talking! Did she put you out here as a guard?"

"She did not," said Ralph.

"I know darn well she didn't," said Joe. "And she wouldn't thank you for it neither. She's got a date with me to-night."

"You lie!" said Ralph. Rage made him cold.

Joe advanced until their bodies almost touched, Ralph held himself in readiness. He meant to make Joe strike first. But the blow was not delivered.

"Damn you!" Joe whispered thickly. "I'll make you swallow that some day. I never forget a thing. I make men pay."

"Why postpone it?" said Ralph clearly.

Joe's voice weakened. "Well, I don't want to make a racket," he grumbled.

"Sure, you don't want to make a racket!" cried Ralph with quick scorn. "A racket would spoil your game! You like darkness and quiet, don't you?" Suddenly the comic aspect of the situation presented itself to him, and he laughed. "There's nothing doing to-night, Joe," he said. "I'm on the job. You might as well go back and have your sleep out."

It was an incontrovertible truth. Joe turned abruptly, and went back over the gangplank, swearing under his breath.

III

ON THE LITTLE RIVER

The next day passed as if the scene of the night had not taken place. The question of the girl passenger did not become acute again, because all the men were too busy to pay her any attention. When they arose to their breakfast Joe Mixer's bearing toward Ralph was as near as he could make it unaltered from the day before. In this a less open nature would have perceived something more dangerous than candid enmity, but it was characteristic of the easy-going Ralph to meet him halfway.

From sun-up to dark they were engaged almost continuously in pulling the little _Tewksbury_ up the Gisborne rapids, crew and passengers pitching in together. After his weeks of inaction at Fort Edward, Ralph welcomed hard work, and felt like a man again. The entire operation was novel and interesting to him. A hawser was sent ashore in a boat, one end remaining on the vessel; the other end was tied to a stout tree upstream, and with eight men at a time bending their backs to the capstan, the little vessel hauled herself up hand over hand on the rope. Meanwhile her paddle-wheel was not idle astern. When the rope was all in, another was sent ashore and the trick repeated. More than once the rope broke and they lost all they had gained. It was nine o'clock before they got in smooth water again, and night was falling when they finally tied up to the bank at Gisborne portage, below the new store of Mixer & Staley.

Ralph himself had made no attempt to approach Nahnya during the day. It was enough for him to watch her covertly, and to picture to himself the delights of the coming journey when he would have her to himself. The fever in Ralph's veins, all unknown to him, was making a dangerously rapid headway. Already the mere thought of this journey was enough to set his heart beating fast.

As they were making a landing in the dusk, every one else being occupied at the moment, Ralph suddenly found her at his elbow saying swiftly:

"You sleep with the men in the bunk-house to-night; I make out I sleep here."

"I won't leave you alone," Ralph began heatedly. "Last night----"

She calmly interrupted him. "I not stay here truly," she said. "Soon as everybody go I walk to my camp at Hat Lake. It is six miles. You come over there early. Soon as it get light. The tote road show you the way."

Some one turned in their direction, and she was gone.

Ralph was, as a matter of course, invited to sup with Mixer and Staley, and to spend the night in their bunkhouse. After having turned in with Joe and the others, he was awakened in the middle of night by hearing the fat man come in and fling himself with muttered curses into a bunk across the room. Ralph swallowed a chuckle and took a fresh hold on sleep.

He awoke automatically when daylight whitened the window-panes, which is to say at three o'clock in June at that latitude. The others were sleeping like vocal logs. Just over the threshold of the stuffy sleeping-place morning was waiting for him, a miracle of refreshment. He inhaled its chill sweetness as if his lungs were for the first time washed with fresh air, and looked about him with the curiosity of the traveller who arrived in the dark. Where he stood men's axes had made a hideous scar on the prospect, and he turned his back on the shacks and the stumps to gaze at the unalterable river. In the half-light the brown flood and the hills opposite had a secret look, a finger on the lips that hushed him from making any noise. It seemed like the earliest morning of earth. The water tempted him to a brief plunge.

Dressing, and taking his bag and blankets, he started to climb with a light heart. Was he not going to her? "This is where the fun really begins," he told himself. The tote road rose in plain view behind the shack. Halfway up the incline Ralph was startled to come upon an Indian youth squatting beside the trail as still as an image--so still that Ralph was upon him before he realized the figure was not part of the landscape. It was a surprising object to find in a world that you thought was all your own.

The boy was gayly attired in an embroidered velvet waistcoat, a clean gingham shirt, a red sash, buckskin trousers, and fancy moccasins. On his head was an expensive felt hat with flaring, stiff brim. He was a handsome, well-set-up youth of about nineteen, with a face as blank of expression as a cat's. A good-sized pack lay on the ground beside him.

"Hello, there!" cried Ralph in his surprise.

The Indian rose, and without altering a muscle of his brown mask, extended a hand. "How!" he said.

"You're up early," said Ralph. "What are you doing here?"

The boy pulled his ear and shook his head to convey to Ralph that his speech was wasted. In unmistakable signs he then let it be known that he was waiting for Ralph, and that Ralph was to follow him.

"Waiting for me?" said Ralph. "Who the deuce are you?"

The boy said something in his own tongue of which Ralph distinguished the word Nahnya. It filled Ralph with a certain disquiet.

Without waiting for more, the Indian shouldered his pack and set off up the trail at a brisk pace. Ralph followed as best he could. The incident had dashed his delight in the morning. There was no room for a third identity in his dreams of the journey that was to be. Ralph made but heavy going. The bulk of his bundles discommoded him more than the weight. He had the roll of blankets under one arm and the dunnage bag under the other. The Indian never looked behind to see how he fared. Reaching the top of the hill he immediately fell into the rolling rack to which white men's hips accommodate themselves only after practice.

The boy's complete indifference to his struggles did not improve Ralph's temper. After a mile of it, panting, perspiring, and with breaking arms, he flung his bundles on the ground and commanded the Indian to stop. The boy came back with a slightly contemptuous air, and putting off his own pack, waited indifferently, looking everywhere but at Ralph.

Ralph swore at him out of his heartfelt exasperation, and the boy brightened a little. Evidently this was something he knew. Ralph with forcible gestures made him understand that he was to show him how to pack the stuff in the proper way on his back.

It was the longest six miles Ralph ever travelled, nor had he any eye for the beauties by the way. To be obliged to exert himself so strenuously before breakfast caused him to feel as if the walls of his stomach had collapsed, and put him in a grinding temper.

At the end of two hours the suspicion of a welcome tang on the air caused Ralph to throw up his head and sniff. "Bacon, by Gad!" he cried aloud.

They turned the spur of a knoll and saw lying before them an exquisite little stretch of water, gleaming like an opal under the pale sky. Along its margin reached a narrow meadow of rich green, where a little fire burned, sending a column of thin smoke straight aloft, and beside the fire was Nahnya. She turned a quick face at the sound of their footsteps.

At sight of her Ralph forgot his hungry ill-temper. The girl was transformed. The deplorable hat, the awkward trade clothes, the ill-fitting shoes were discarded. She was wearing a blue flannel shirt open at the throat, and with the sleeves turned up revealing a pair of poetic forearms; a buckskin skirt, and moccasins of white doeskin, silk embroidered. Thus garbed she was as suitable to her background of woods and water as one of the wild swans up the lake. Ralph, gazing at her, felt triumphantly justified. "I knew she looked like this!" he thought.

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.