"What do you want?" she burst out. "A padded chair? Don't be ridiculous, father!"
Sir Bryson swelled and snorted. "That is no way to speak to your father, Belinda. Because you see me robbed of my outward and visible dignity is no reason for your forgetting the respect you owe me. I am surprised at you."
Linda's muttered reply was forcible and inelegant. None of the others paid any attention. Sir Bryson, feeling perhaps that a magisterial air accorded ill with his tousled hair and his cross-legged position, made a bid for sympathy instead.
"My feet are going to sleep," he said plaintively.
Jack, overhearing, was reminded again of the resemblance between father and daughter. "You don't have to sit still," he said, speaking over his shoulder. "You can move about as long as you don't all get on the same side at the same time."
Sir Bryson, who would not have been robbed of his grievance for any consideration, continued to sit and suffer dramatically.
Vassall's head was heavy. Stretching himself out, and watching Linda wistfully, he finally fell asleep. Humpy Jull, up at the bow—if a raft may be said to have a bow—constructed a fishing line out of a bent pin and a moccasin lace, and baiting it with a morsel of bacon, fished for hours with the trusting confidence of a child. Discouraged at last, he fell asleep beside Vassall.
Thus the morning passed. Left to its own devices, the raft swung around and back in the eddying current, and a superb panorama was ceaselessly and slowly unrolled for any who cared to see. The river moved down through its vast trough in the prairie, and an ever-changing vista of high hills, or seeming hills, hemmed them in. On the southerly side the hills were timbered for the most part. On the northerly side, where the sun beat all day, the steep slopes were bare, and the rich grass made vivid velvety effects darkened in the hollows and touched with gold on the knolls. The whole made a green symphony, comprising every note in the scale of green from the sombre spruce boughs up through the milky emerald of the river water to the high verdancy of the sunny grass and the delicate poplar foliage.
Of them all only Kate Worsley watched it as if the sight was enough to repay one for the discomfort of sitting on poles. Her quiet eyes were lifted to the hills with the look of one storing away something to remember.
Now and then a momentary excitement was created by the sight of a bear grubbing about the roots of the poplar saplings, homely, comical beasts with their clumsy ways and their expression of pretended cuteness. Something still wild in the breasts of domesticated creatures like ourselves never fails to answer to the sight of a real wild thing at home in his own place. Since they had no time to go ashore in case of a hit, no shots were fired.