"I am a savage," said Miss Lois, "and you shall go where you please. The truth is, Ruth, that while I am pursuing this matter with my mental faculties, you are pursuing it with the inmost fibres of your heart." (The sentence was mixed, but the feeling sincere.) "I will go down this very moment, and begin an arrangement about a boat for you."
She kept her word. Anne, sitting by the window, heard her narrating to Mrs. Blackwell a long chain of reasons to explain the fancy of her niece Ruth for rowing. "She inherits it from her mother, poor child," said the widow, with the sigh which she always gave to the memory of her departed relatives. "Her mother was the daughter of a light-house keeper, and lived, one might say, afloat. Little Ruthie, as a baby, used to play boat; her very baby-talk was full of sailor words. You haven't any kind of a row-boat she could use, have you?"
Mrs. Blackwell replied that they had not, but that a neighbor farther down the river owned a skiff which might be borrowed.
"Borrow it, then," said Mrs. Young. "They will lend it to you, of course, in a friendly way, and then we can pay you something for the use of it."
This thrifty arrangement, of which Mrs. Blackwell unaided would never have thought, was carried into effect, and early the next morning the skiff floated at the foot of the meadow, tied to an overhanging branch.
In the afternoon Mrs. Young, in the farm wagon, accompanied by her hostess, and her hostess's little son as driver, set off for John Cole's farm, to see, in Mrs. Blackwell's language, "the pynies." A little later Anne was in the skiff, rowing up the river. She had not had oars in her hands since she left the island.
She rowed on for an hour, through the green fields, then through the woods. Long-legged flies skated on the still surface of the water, insects with gauzy wings floated to and fro. A dragon-fly with steel-blue mail lighted on the edge of the boat. The burnished little creature seemed attracted. He would not leave her, but even when he took flight floated near by on his filmy wings, timing his advance with hers. With one of those vague impulses by which women often select the merest chance to decide their actions, Anne said to herself, "I will row on until I lose sight of him." Turning the skiff, she took one oar for a paddle, and followed the dragon-fly. He flew on now more steadily, selecting the middle of the stream. No doubt he had a dragon-fly's motives; perhaps he was going home; but whether he was or not, he led Anne's boat onward until the river grew suddenly narrower, and entered a ravine. Here, where the long boughs touched leaf-tips over her head, and everything was still and green, she lost him. The sun was sinking toward the western horizon line; it was time to return; but she said to herself that she would come again on the morrow, and explore this cool glen to which her gauzy-winged guide had brought her. When she reached home she found Miss Lois there, and in a state of profound discomfiture. "The man was left-handed enough," she said, "but, come to look at him, he hadn't any little finger at all: chopped off by mistake when a boy. Now the little finger in the impression is the most distinct part of the whole; and so we've lost a day, and the price of the wagon thrown in, not to speak of enough talking about peonies to last a lifetime! There's a fair to-morrow, and of course I must go: more left hands: although now, I confess, they swim round me in a cloud of vexation and peonies, which makes me never want to lay eyes on one of them again;" and she gave a groan, ending in a long yawn. However, the next morning, with patience and energies renewed by sleep, she rose early, like a phœnix from her ashes, and accompanied Mrs. Blackwell to the fair. Anne, again in her skiff, went up the river. She rowed to the glen where she had lost the dragon-fly. Here she rested on her oars a moment. The river still haunted her. "He went away in a boat," had not been out of her mind since it first came to her. "He went away in a boat," she now thought again. "Would he, then, have rowed up or down the stream? If he had wished to escape from the neighborhood, he would have rowed down to the larger river below. He would not have rowed up stream unless he lived somewhere in this region, and was simply going home, because there is no main road in this direction, no railway, nothing but farms which touch each other for miles round. Now, as I believe he was not a stranger, but a resident, I will suppose that he went up stream, and I will follow him." She took up her oars and rowed on.
The stream grew still narrower. She had been rowing a long time, and knew that she must be far from home. Nothing broke the green solitude of the shore until at last she came suddenly upon a little board house, hardly more than a shanty, standing near the water, with the forest behind. She started as she saw it, and a chill ran over her. And yet what was it? Only a little board house.
She rowed past; it seemed empty and silent. She turned the skiff, came back, and gathering her courage, landed, and timidly tried the door; it was locked. She went round and looked through the window. There was no one within, but there were signs of habitation—some common furniture, a gun, and on the wall a gaudy picture of the Virgin and the Holy Child. She scrutinized the place with eyes that noted even the mark of muddy boots on the floor and the gray ashes from a pipe on the table. Then suddenly she felt herself seized with fear. If the owner of the cabin should steal up behind her, and ask her what she was doing there! She looked over her shoulder fearfully. But no one was visible, no one was coming up or down the river; her own boat was the only thing that moved, swaying to and fro where she had left it tied to a tree trunk. With the vague terror still haunting her, she hastened to the skiff, pushed off, and paddled swiftly away. But during the long voyage homeward the fear did not entirely die away. "I am growing foolishly nervous," she said to herself, with a weary sigh.
Miss Lois had discovered no left-handed men at the fair; but she had seen a person whom she considered suspicious—a person who sold medicines. "He was middle-sized," she said to Anne, in the low tone they used when within the house, "and he had a down look—a thing I never could abide. He spoke, too, in an odd voice. I suspected him as soon as I laid my eyes upon him, and so just took up a station near him, and watched. He wasn't left-handed exactly," she added, as though he might have been so endowed inexactly; "but he is capable of anything—left-handed, web-footed, or whatever you please. After taking a good long look at him, I went round and made (of course by chance, and accidentally) some inquiries. Nobody seemed to know much about him except that his name is Juder (and highly appropriate in my opinion), and he came to the fair the day before with his little hand-cart of medicines, and went out again, into the country somewhere, at sunset. Do you mark the significance of that, Ruth Young? He did not stay at the Timloe hotel (prices reduced for the fair, and very reasonable beds on the floor), like the other traders; but though the fair is to be continued over to-morrow, and he is to be there, he took all the trouble to go out of town for the night."