Garth, with his pipe and the mighty stillness to bear him company, remained on deck until dawn. In the spirit of the North he discovered something akin to his own soul; the solitude and the stillness braced him to deny himself manfully what was not manfully his to have. In the act of relinquishing Natalie, he felt, what he would not have supposed possible, a great, added tenderness for her. Before he went in, his sober cheerfulness had returned; but in the morning he was somehow more mature.
VII
MARY CO-QUE-WASA'S ERRAND
At noon next day the little Aurora Borealis was reclining drunkenly on a shoal in the river at the foot of Caliper island, sixty miles above the Landing, and fifteen below the Warehouse. This had been the place of Captain Jack's gloomy forebodings all the way up. The river spread wide, shallow and swift on either side the island, and neither one channel nor the other would permit their ascent. The Aurora was having a little breathing space on the shoal, while Captain Jack and St. Paul, the big half-breed pilot, debated below on what to do.
The three passengers looked on from the upper deck. Natalie and Garth tacitly ignored any change in their relation to-day; and no reference was made to Natalie's story. They seemed, if anything, more friendly with each other; nevertheless Constraint, like a spectre standing between them, intercepted all their communications.
The third passenger was a half-breed woman nearing middle age, clad in a decent black print dress, and a black straw hat, under the brim of which depended a circlet of attenuated, grizzled curls. Her face, like that of all the natives in the presence of whites, expressed a blank, in her case a mysterious blank. She was silent and ubiquitous; whichever way they looked, there she was. Captain Jack had mentioned to Garth that her name was Mary Co-que-wasa. The off-hand shrug that accompanied the information, between men, was significant. Garth resented it; and his sympathies were enlisted. He had made several efforts to talk to the woman, only to be received with a stupid shake of the head. He thought she could not speak English. Natalie, more keenly intuitive, took an active dislike to her. "I'm sure she listens to us," she had said.
Meanwhile, preparations were undertaken to hoist the Aurora Borealis by main strength up the rapids. The "skiff," as they whimsically termed the steamboat's great, clumsy tender—its official name of "sturgeon-head" was more descriptive—was brought alongside; and a half-mile of hawser, more or less, patiently coiled in the bottom. The end of this rope was made fast on board the steamer, and the skiff, pushing off, was poled and tracked up the rapids with heart-breaking labour, paying out the hawser over her stern as she went. The other end of the rope was made fast to a great tree on the shore above, and, the skiff returning, the inboard end was turned about the capstan. Steam was then turned on, and with a great to-do of puffing and clanking, the Aurora started to haul herself up hand over hand, as one might say.
Alas! she had no sooner raised her head than the hawser parted in the middle with a report like a small cannon, and she settled dejectedly back on the shoal.