"Ah!"
"Patty Lake her name was. We called her Pattycake. She was sweet. Always wore pink, and had two fat, brown braids hanging down her back."
"Well?" a little breathlessly.
"Married the butcher's boy, that's all."
There were many breaks and pauses in this conversation. So off-hand was Nahnya's manner, and such her preoccupation with the needle, that Ralph never guessed he was being searched through and through by a woman's loving, jealous curiosity.
The little black book continued:
"When we left our grassy point and paddled around the big curve in McIlwraith Lake, suddenly we hove in sight of half a dozen whitewashed huts on the shore. And a flag-pole with a flag against the blue! Gave me a regular thrill. The Hudson's Bay Company uses the Union Jack with the letters H.B.C. in white. The fellows up here say it stands for 'Here Before Christ.' As we paddled by, a white man came out of the store and hailed us. Nahnya wouldn't stop. 'Ask too much questions,' she said. This was Fort McIlwraith that I have heard of.
"Immediately afterward we got in the river again. It is deeper and swifter after every lake. Here it is called the Pony River, Nahnya says. There were some ugly snags. Nahnya is a wonder with the paddle. We camped in the middle of a wide, burned-over stretch. It was like a farm-field. You kept looking around for fences and cattle, and a house somewhere.
"Next morning the river slowed up and lost itself among a lot of low islands covered with gigantic cottonwood trees. You could see there was a change coming. As we paddled around the end of an island, me all unawares, we were snatched up—snatched is the word—by a violent green current that raced us down half a mile, and wet us in a rapid before I got my bearings.
"Nahnya says this is the Rice River. It is half a dozen times as big as the Pony. It is a thick, yellowish-green colour like jade, and a funny hissing sound comes up from the surface. Nahnya says it is made by the stones chasing along the stony bottom. It is a gaunt, ragged, bad-tempered looking stream, always gnawing under its banks and bringing the trees down on the run, and then piling the debris in untidy heaps on naked pebble bars in the middle. The cut-banks are astonishing—some of them a hundred feet high, the trees looking like toys along the top edge, waiting their turn to fall over. Out of these smooth slopes, naked as railway embankments, harder strata of earth stick up like castles, with millions of swallows building in them.