From sun-up to dark they were engaged almost continuously in pulling the little Tewksbury up the Gisborne rapids, crew and passengers pitching in together. After his weeks of inaction at Fort Edward, Ralph welcomed hard work, and felt like a man again. The entire operation was novel and interesting to him. A hawser was sent ashore in a boat, one end remaining on the vessel; the other end was tied to a stout tree upstream, and with eight men at a time bending their backs to the capstan, the little vessel hauled herself up hand over hand on the rope. Meanwhile her paddle-wheel was not idle astern. When the rope was all in, another was sent ashore and the trick repeated. More than once the rope broke and they lost all they had gained. It was nine o'clock before they got in smooth water again, and night was falling when they finally tied up to the bank at Gisborne portage, below the new store of Mixer & Staley.
Ralph himself had made no attempt to approach Nahnya during the day. It was enough for him to watch her covertly, and to picture to himself the delights of the coming journey when he would have her to himself. The fever in Ralph's veins, all unknown to him, was making a dangerously rapid headway. Already the mere thought of this journey was enough to set his heart beating fast.
As they were making a landing in the dusk, every one else being occupied at the moment, Ralph suddenly found her at his elbow saying swiftly:
"You sleep with the men in the bunk-house to-night; I make out I sleep here."
"I won't leave you alone," Ralph began heatedly. "Last night——"
She calmly interrupted him. "I not stay here truly," she said. "Soon as everybody go I walk to my camp at Hat Lake. It is six miles. You come over there early. Soon as it get light. The tote road show you the way."
Some one turned in their direction, and she was gone.
Ralph was, as a matter of course, invited to sup with Mixer and Staley, and to spend the night in their bunkhouse. After having turned in with Joe and the others, he was awakened in the middle of night by hearing the fat man come in and fling himself with muttered curses into a bunk across the room. Ralph swallowed a chuckle and took a fresh hold on sleep.
He awoke automatically when daylight whitened the window-panes, which is to say at three o'clock in June at that latitude. The others were sleeping like vocal logs. Just over the threshold of the stuffy sleeping-place morning was waiting for him, a miracle of refreshment. He inhaled its chill sweetness as if his lungs were for the first time washed with fresh air, and looked about him with the curiosity of the traveller who arrived in the dark. Where he stood men's axes had made a hideous scar on the prospect, and he turned his back on the shacks and the stumps to gaze at the unalterable river. In the half-light the brown flood and the hills opposite had a secret look, a finger on the lips that hushed him from making any noise. It seemed like the earliest morning of earth. The water tempted him to a brief plunge.
Dressing, and taking his bag and blankets, he started to climb with a light heart. Was he not going to her? "This is where the fun really begins," he told himself. The tote road rose in plain view behind the shack. Halfway up the incline Ralph was startled to come upon an Indian youth squatting beside the trail as still as an image—so still that Ralph was upon him before he realized the figure was not part of the landscape. It was a surprising object to find in a world that you thought was all your own.