“Neither can I, for that matter. But it does seem as if he must have told them not to tell anybody they had seen him.”
“It is not like him.”
“Ahteeah said Imbrie hated white men; Etzooah said his heart was kind to all men: which is the truer description?”
“Etzooah’s,” she said instantly. “He has a simple, kind heart. He lives up to the rule ‘Love thy neighbour’ better than any man I ever knew.”
“Well, we’ll know to-morrow,” said Stonor, making haste to drop the disconcerting subject. Privately he asked himself: “Why, if Imbrie is such a good man, does she seem to dread meeting him?” There was no answer forthcoming.
The rapids became progressively wilder and rougher as they went on down, and Stonor was not without anxiety as to the coming back. Sometimes they came on white water unexpectedly around a bend, but the river was not so crooked now, and more often far ahead they saw the white rabbits dancing in the sunshine, causing their breasts to constrict with a foretaste of fear. As the current bore them inexorably closer, and they picked out the rocks and the great white combers awaiting them, there was always a moment when they longed to turn aside from their fate. But once having plunged into the welter, fear vanished, and a great exhilaration took its place. They shouted madly to each other—even stolid Mary, and were sorry when they came to the bottom. Between rapids the smooth stretches seemed insufferably tedious to pass.
Stonor’s endeavour was to steer a middle course between the great billows in the middle of the channel, which he feared might swamp the Serpent or break her in half, and the rocks at each side which would have smashed her to pieces. Luckily he had had a couple of days in which to learn the vagaries of his craft. In descending a swift current one has to bear in mind that any boat begins to answer her helm some yards ahead of the spot where the impulse is applied.
As the day wore on he bethought himself that “one sleep” was an elastic term of distance, and in order to avoid the possibility of being carried over the falls he adopted the rule of landing at the head of each rapid, and walking down the shore to pick his channel, and to make sure that there was smooth water below. They had been told that there was no rapid immediately above the falls, that the water slipped over without giving warning, but Stonor dismissed this into the limbo of red-skin romancing. He did not believe it possible for a river to go over a fall without some preliminary disturbance.
As it happened, dusk descended on them in the middle of a smooth reach, and they made camp for the last time on the descent, pitching the three tents under the pines in the form of a little square open on the river side. Clare was very silent during the meal, and Stonor’s gaiety sounded hollow in his own ears. They turned in immediately after eating.
Stonor awoke in the middle of the night without being able to tell what had awakened him. He had a sense that something was wrong. It was a breathless cool night. Under the pines it was very dark, but outside of their shadow the river gleamed wanly. Such sounds as he heard, the murmur of a far-off rapid, and a whisper in the topmost boughs of the pines, conveyed a suggestion of empty immeasurable distances. The fire had burned down to its last embers.