"I'm good to you, ain't I?"
"Very."
There was a moment of silence, and then the boy added, "I love you."
Those words gave the man a new sense of comfort. If he could have done so he would have embraced his son and covered his face with kisses.
The sun had sunk low and they were entering the edge of the night and the woodland. Soon the boy fell asleep. The silence of the illimitable sky seemed to be flooding down and delightful sounds were drifting on its current. They had passed the inn, long ago and walls of fir and pine were on either side of them. Gordon put into a deep cove, stopping under the pine-trees with his bow on a sand-bar. Then he let himself down, stretching his legs on the canoe bottom and lying back on his blanket.
For a long time he lay there thinking. He had been a man of some refinement, and nature had punished him, after an old fashion, for the abuse of it with extreme sensitiveness. He had come to the Adirondacks from a New England city and married and gone into business. At first he had prospered, and then he had begun to go down.
He had been a lover of music and a reader of the poets. As he lay thinking in the early dusk he heard the notes of the wood-thrush. That bird was like a welcoming trumpeter before the gate of a palace; it bade him be at home. Above all he could hear the water song of Fiddler's Falls—the tremulous, organ bass of rock caverns upon which the river drummed as it fell, the chorus of the on-rushing stream and great overtones in the timber.
Sound and rhythm seemed to be full of that familiar strain—so like a solemn warning:
