The next day Kenyon stayed in camp with Charlie Knapp, and watched Phil’s departure upstream. Joe had full instructions and as he followed Gallatin’s broad shoulders into the brush he turned toward the fire and nodded to Kenyon. There was a pact between them and Kenyon understood.
The sun was high before Joe left the stream and cut into the underbrush. His employer hadn’t even taken his rod from its case, and his creel was empty. Early in the morning he had asked his guide to take him to the little stream where the deer was killed, and he followed the swift noiseless steps of the old Indian, his shoulders bent, his eyes peering through the thicket in search of landmarks. It was midday before the two men reached the familiar water and Phil identified the two bowlders above his old camping-place. Here Keegón halted, eying the pool below.
“Fish,” said he.
Gallatin fingered at the fastenings of his rod case, looking downstream, while Joe sat on a rock and munched a biscuit.
“I’m going downstream, Joe. You follow.”
The Indian nodded and Gallatin moved down among the rocks in the bed of the stream. Pools invited him, but he did not fish. He had not even jointed his rod. He was moving rapidly now, like a man with a mission, a mission with which fishing had nothing in common, splashing through the shallow water, jumping from rock to rock, or where the going was good along the shore, through the underbrush. There was a trail to follow now, a faint trail scarcely defined, but in which he saw the faint marks of last year’s footprints. His own they must be, heavy from the weight of the deer he had carried through the mud and wet. They were the symbols of his regeneration. Since then he had brought other burdens to camp and had thrown them at her feet, for what?
Later on, in a moist spot, he stopped and peered at the ground curiously. Other footprints had emerged from somewhere and joined his own, fresh footprints, one made by the in-turned toe of an Indian, the other smaller, the heel of which cut deep into the mud and moss. He bent forward following them eagerly. What could a woman be doing here?
Suddenly Gallatin straightened and sniffed the air. The smoke of a camp fire! The smell of cooking fish! Some one had preceded him. He moved forward cautiously, his heart beating with suppressed excitement, his mind for the first time aware that unusual impulses had dominated him all the morning. He also knew that the smell of those cooking fish was delicious.
In a moment he recognized the glade, the two beech trees and the rock, saw the bulk of the shack that he had built, the glow of the fire and a small figure sitting on a log before it, cooking fish on a spit. He stopped and passed a hand before his eyes. Had a year passed? Or was it—yesterday? Who was the girl that sat familiarly at his fire, hatless, her brown hair tawny in the sunlight, her slender neck bent forward?