“Would it not be fine if we could catch a salmon and have it all cooked when Father comes back?” Anna suggested, but Rebby shook her head.
“We haven’t any salmon spear, and it is quick and skilful work,” she responded. “Father will be better pleased if we obey him and rest here.”
From where the girls were sitting they could look some distance up the quiet stream, and it was Anna who first discovered a canoe being paddled close to the opposite shore.
“Look, Rebby,” she said, pointing in the direction of the slow-moving craft. “Isn’t that an Indian?”
Rebby looked, and after a moment answered: “Why, I suppose it is, and after salmon. But he won’t come down so near the falls.” But the girls watched the slow-moving canoe rather anxiously until it drew close in to the opposite shore, and was hidden by the overhanging branches of the trees.
Rebby decided that she would gather some dry grass and sticks for the fire, and asked Anna to go down near the mill and bring up some of the bits of wood lying about there.
“Then when Father does bring the salmon we can start a blaze right away,” she said.
Anna ran off toward the mill yard, and Rebby left the shade of the big beeches to pull handfuls of the sun-dried grass.
Rebby had gone but a few steps when she heard a queer singing murmur that seemed to be just above her head. She looked up, but the sky was clear; there was no bird flying low, as she had imagined; but as she walked along the murmur became louder, and Rebby began to look about her more carefully. A short distance from the flat rock was a huge stump of a broken tree, and Rebby soon realized that the noise came from the stump, and she approached it cautiously.
“Oh!” she exclaimed. “It’s a honey-tree! It is! It is!” for she had seen the bees as they went steadily in a dark murmuring line, direct to the old stump.