I glanced at the list she handed me, and wondered what Harry, who had to visit Vancouver, would say when he found I had pledged him to ransack the dry-goods stores for all kinds of fabrics. Still, I felt I should have faced much more than my comrades’ remonstrances to please Grace Carrington then, as she stood beside me, glorified as it were by the garish sunset.
“My aunt will be especially grateful,” she added. “And now, good-bye. She will never forgive you if you damage her new dress.”
She spoke with a half-mocking and wholly bewitching air, for when Grace unbent she did it charmingly, holding out a shapely hand, while the light sparkled among the glossy clusters above her forehead. Grace’s hair might have been intended for a net in which to catch stray sunshine. Then while I prepared to take up the challenge the slender fingers tightened on my own.
“What was that?” she asked with a start, for a wild shrill cry rang suddenly out of the stillness, and the hillside returned the sound in a doleful wailing before it died away.
“Only a loon, a water-bird!” I said, though the cry had also startled me.
Grace shivered as she answered: “I have never heard it 167 before, and it sounded so unearthly—almost like a warning of some evil. But it is growing late, and you have far to go. I shall expect you at the crossing.”
She turned back toward the house, and I laughed at my momentary confusion as I rode on through the deepening shadow, for though it is strangely mournful the loon’s shrill call was nothing unusual in that land. Still, mere coincidence as it was, remembering Grace’s shiver it troubled me, and I should have been more uneasy had I known how we were to keep that fateful tryst.
It was a glorious morning when, with a package strapped to the saddle, I rode down between the pine trunks to the crossing. The river flashed like burnished silver below, and the sunlight made colored haloes in the filmy spray that drifted about the black mouth of the cañon, while rising and falling in thunderous cadence the voice of many waters rang forth from its gloomy depths. The package was a heavy one, for there were many domestic sundries as well as yards of dry-goods packed within it, and Harry assured me it had taken him a whole day to procure them, adding that he was doubtful even then whether he had satisfactorily filled the bill.
I had loitered some time on the hillside until I could see the party winding down the opposite slope. Then the forest hid them, and it appeared that, perhaps because the waters were high, they were not going straight to the usual ford, but intended first to send the ladies across in a canoe which lay lower down near a slacker portion of the rapid stream. The slope on my own side was steep, but, picking my way cautiously, I was not far above the river, which boiled in a succession of white-ridged rapids, when I saw Grace seat herself in the stern of the canoe, which Ormond thrust off until it was nearly afloat. Then he returned for her aunt, while Colonel Carrington and rancher Lawrence 168 led the horses toward the somewhat risky ford up-stream. The river was swollen by melting snow, and it struck me that they would have some difficulty in crossing.
Then a hoarse shout rang out, “The canoe’s adrift!” followed by another from the Colonel, “Get hold of the paddle, Grace!—for your life paddle!”