When Lida turned from the governor’s daughter she saw the governor himself coming toward her. He held out the cant dog; it lay across his palms and he tendered it respectfully.
She winked the mist of tears from her eyes and struggled with a hysterical desire to babble many words.
“Hush!” warned the priest. “We all know!”
There, in a golden silence, she realized how cheap and base was the clinking metal of speech that had been the currency of herself and others in the crowded town.
The river, slowed by the deadwater, was mute, though its foam streaks showed where it had crashed through the gorges above. A few chickadees chirruped bravely. There were no other sounds while the girl took the Flagg scepter in her own hands.
She walked with Felix to the shore, where the flotilla of canoes lay upturned at the pull-out place. Again the Oronos were assigned to her, and she was comforted much because they no longer seemed like strangers.
“Au revoir!” called Father Leroque when the canoes were afloat on the brown flood. “I’m making haste to the Tomah, mam’selle, to keep my promise!”
He had already accomplished so much for her! In her new thanksgiving spirit she was finding it easy to believe that he could bring about what her self-acknowledged love for Latisan so earnestly desired.
In single file, holding close to the shore, the canoes went toward the north. There was no talk between those who paddled; against the brown shore the canoes were merely moving smudges.
Rufus Craig, coming down the middle of the deadwater in one of the great bateaus of the Comas company, paid no attention to the smudges. The bateau rode high and rapidly on the flood that moved down the channel. Craig was writing in his notebook and four oarsmen were obeying his command to dip deep and pull strong.