CHAPTER XV
REVELATIONS
The two skiffs, now paddled, now poled, glided along the green-bronze waters of the woodland shores; the girls, sitting in the stern, were silent, this partly from Shipman's suggestion. Minga had started her customary chatter, but the lawyer laid his big hand on her shoulder. She looked up to find him, finger on lips, dark eyes smiling into hers. "If you want to see things," he whispered, "you'll have to be as dumb as a silent policeman." Minga, remembering the night on South Mountain, gave a slight involuntary shiver which the man noticed.
"Child!" exclaimed Shipman suddenly. He looked long and intently into the little face; he must have seen something rare like the blue shell of an eager little soul-bird, a little shell that must not be broken too roughly. "Forgive me for everything," he said contritely; "you must think me an awful sort of brute. Talk as much as you like, you rosebud. I only meant, well, there are things to see if one is quiet, you know!"
Minga smiled back into his face. It was an uncertain little smile, shorn of her usual gay sparkle and challenge or the repartee of what was known as "the Minga line." Seeing this, the lawyer removed his hand from her shoulder quickly; he reached for his pipe and tobacco and lighted up for his abstemious afternoon smoke. Minga idly watched his deliberate movements, the curious impression that he gave of inherent remorseless power, of so physical and dynamic a kind fed by so enormous a reservoir of understanding and self-control that the girl might well feel in awe of it.
Paddle in hand, Shipman stood in the bow of the boat. He dug softly into the deep flow of the water; they turned the slow curve of an island, rounding afresh into long avenues of alders and elderberry and toward the purple gloom of hanging swamp maples. Colter's boat, Sard leaning eagerly forward, followed. Now and then the two men would halt and point to some half distinguished object, a great gray hornet's nest whorled like a ball of paper cinders in the thicket, a blue heron standing motionless, a mud hen sitting heavily in a dead tree. The long line of empty mussel shells was strung like big beads over the cushions of soft moss; a muskrat swam across the stream; a chipmunk, sitting on his haunches and munching like a cooky, a dark-brown mushroom—here and there clusters of scarlet amanita, yellow fungus like sponges, the delicate hanging Clintonia bells, or a thousand filmy patches of moss, where little trumpets blew and coral lights glowed, and little banners and transparencies marked the tiny march of plant progress.
Colter, steadily sculling his flat-bottomed craft, looked with evident delight on these things—his gaunt form stood steadily on its long legs, there was determined, practiced deliberation in his movements and his were the eyes that first discovered this and that rarity. The intense gaze of the man seemed to burn into the dim forest walls of summer, his ears caught every subdued note, he peered like a sort of necromancer at a spider web, at a snail lethargically climbing the mud bank or a patch of sun dew, all its little gummy tentacles alert for fly-capture.
Minga, turning once, heard him mutter something under his breath; she stole a startled glance at him as her own boat sped along, and leaned forward.