"I was almost waist-deep when I last went through," said Valentine, who did not display his usual perspicacity. "How did you get across?"
Anthea dismissed the subject with perfect composure. "Then there could not have been anything like so much water. Jimmy helped me over."
Jimmy went forward, and disappeared through the scuttle into the forecastle, and some little while later Valentine came down and looked at him with a dry smile.
"I don't yet understand how Miss Merril got across that creek," he said.
"I fancied she told you;" and Jimmy felt his face grow warm.
Valentine laughed. "Perhaps she did, but it seems to me that she wasn't remarkably explicit."
Jimmy said nothing, and presently climbed into his berth, where he lay for a while trying to recall every incident of the journey he and Anthea Merril had made through the shadowy bush, until it occurred to him that he was only preparing trouble for himself by doing so, and he went to sleep.
It was raining when he awoke, and it rained for most of three days as hard as it often does on that coast, until the crystal depths of the Inlet grew turbid, and it flowed seaward between its dripping walls of mountains like a river. At last one afternoon the clouds were rolled away, and when fierce, glaring sunshine beat down Austerly decided that he would go ashore to fish. The men went with him, Valentine to pull the dory into the swollen river, Jimmy and Louis in the Siwash canoe to gather bark for fuel. When they approached the beach where they usually landed, Jimmy glanced thoughtfully at the great torn-up pines that went sliding by.
"If one of those logs drove across her it might start a plank," he said. "Besides, there's every sign of a vicious breeze, and I think I'll go off by and by and swing her in behind the next point. She would lie snugger there out of the stream."
Valentine looked up at the hard blue sky across which ragged cloud-wisps were driving, and nodded. "It generally does blow quite fresh after rain like what we have had," he said. "You could break the anchor out yourself. I want Louis to get a good load of bark."