“Just as you like. If I untie your hands, will you write a line from my dictation?”
“No. What foolishness is this?”
“Only that I suspect you can neither read nor write. This is your opportunity to prove that you can.”
“Oh, go to hell!”
“I’m satisfied,” said Stonor, putting away the book.
Travelling down the river next morning was child’s play by comparison with the labour of the ascent. The current carried them with light hearts. That is to say, two of the hearts on board were light. Imbrie, crouched in the bow with his inscrutable gaze, was hatching new schemes of villainy perhaps. Clare sat as far as possible from him, and with her back turned. All day she maintained the fiction that she and Stonor were alone in the dug-out. In the reaction from the terrors of the last few days her speech bubbled like a child’s. She pitched her voice low to keep it from carrying forward. All her thoughts looked to the future.
“Three or four days to the village at Swan Lake, you say. We won’t have to wait there, will we?”
“My horses are waiting.”
“Then four days more to Fort Enterprise. You said there was a white woman there. How I long to see one of my own kind! She’ll be my first—in this incarnation. Then we’ll go right out on the steamboat, won’t we?”
“We’ll have to wait a few days for her August trip.”