As far as he was concerned he frankly dreaded the outcome of the journey. How was he to bear himself at the meeting of this divided couple? He could not avoid being a witness of it. He must hand her over with a smile, he supposed, and make a graceful get-away. But suppose he were prevented from leaving immediately. Or suppose, as was quite likely, that they wished to return with him! He ground his teeth at the thought of such an ordeal. Would he be able to carry it off? He must!
“What’s the matter?” Clare asked suddenly. She had been studying his face.
“Why did you ask?”
“You looked as if you had a sudden pain.”
“I had,” he said, with a rueful smile. “My knees. It’s so long since I paddled that they’re not limbered up yet.”
She appeared not altogether satisfied with this explanation.
This part of the river showed a succession of long smooth reaches with low banks of a uniform height bordered with picturesque ragged jack-pines, tall, thin, and sharply pointed. Here and there, where the composition seemed to require it, a perfect island was planted in the brown flood. At the foot of the pines along the edge of each bank grew rows of berry bushes as regularly as if set out by a gardener. Already the water was receding as a result of the summer drouth, but, as fast as it fell, the muddy beach left at the foot of each bank was mantled with the tender green of goose-grass, a diminutive cousin of the tropical bamboo. Mile after mile the character of the stream showed no variance. It was like a noble corridor through the pines.
At intervals during the day they met a few Kakisas, singly or in pairs, in their beautifully-made little birch-bark canoes. These individuals, when they came upon them suddenly, almost capsized in their astonishment at beholding pale-faces on their river. No doubt, in the tepees behind the willows, the coming of the whites had long been foretold as a portent of dreadful things.
They displayed their feelings according to their various natures. The first they met, a solitary youth, was frankly terrified. He hastened ashore, the water fairly cascading from his paddle, and, squatting behind the bushes, peered through at them like an animal. The next pair stood their ground, clinging to an overhanging willow—too startled to escape perhaps—where they stared with goggling eyes, and visibly trembled. It gave Stonor and Clare a queer sense of power thus to have their mere appearance create so great an excitement. Nothing could be got out of these two; they would not even answer questions from Mary in their own tongue.
The fourth Kakisa, however, an incredibly ragged and dirty old man with a dingy cotton fillet around his snaky locks, hailed them with wild shouts of laughter, paddled to meet them, and clung to the dug-out, fondly stroking Stonor’s sleeve. The sight of Clare caused him to go off into fresh shrieks of good-natured merriment. His name, he informed them, was Lookoovar, or so they understood it. He had a stomach-ache, he said, and wished for some of the white man’s wonderful stomach-warming medicine of which he had heard.