"Charley does not look like you," Ralph said presently.
"Charley what you call my half brother," she said. "His father not the same as my father."
"Your father was a white man?" hazarded Ralph.
She calmly ignored the question. Ralph felt a little flattened out.
The rapids followed each other with short intervals between. The river having taken in several little tributaries during the day was less diminutive now, but no less charming. It was a jolly little stream that loved to surprise them with new tricks around every bend. It was not without its element of danger, too, at least to their baggage. Rounding a bend, Nahnya suddenly shouted a command to her brother, and leaped overboard. The water reached to her knees. Bracing herself against the tearing current, she held on grimly.
The startled Ralph looking around saw that Charley was likewise overboard. The reason was plain. A pine tree undermined by the current had toppled over to the opposite bank, and lay trailing its branches in the current, and completely blocking all passage. Ralph, though Nahnya forbade it, joined them in the icy water, and between the three of them they edged the boat ashore. Charley quickly chopped a way through.
They camped for the night on top of a bluff, about fifteen feet above the river. There was a little clearing and the remains of old campfires. The view upstream in the lingering twilight was enchanting. As time went on Ralph noticed that all the regular camping-places along the river had been chosen with a discriminating eye for beauty of outlook.
That evening Ralph's spirits blew a whole gale. He could be friendly enough with Charley now. By degrees he apprehended that the strange aloofness of both brother and sister was for the most part merely the aloofness of children; they required to be won. Since Ralph had a good deal of the child left in him, his instinct taught him how to set about it. To do his share of the work with a right good will; to put off the least suspicion of "side"; and to make fun—especially to make fun—such was his simple method. Ralph played the fool with all his might.
Charley soon succumbed. Charley was Boy in the concrete—simple, undiscerning, and hard-headed; limited in outlook, therefore prone to scorn. Nahnya was more complicated. Ralph's overtures at first only made her more skittish and distant. Ralph redoubled his efforts. "I'll make her laugh, or break a leg," he vowed.
And obliged to laugh she was, finally, at the sight of Ralph flipping cakes in the pan to the accompaniment of a double shuffle.