With a swift flash of a glance at his white lips and the little drops upon his forehead, the girl stepped into the boat, took up the paddle and pushed out into the lake. And under her strong hands the canoe shot through the water, headed for the north end of the lake and for a little cove, cliff-bound.
Dick half slept as the canoe sped on and on. Finally he roused as they rounded a rocky point, flashed by a little green cove into which a narrow spray of water fell from the cliffs above, skirted a dense pine grove, and turned suddenly into a second tiny bay, sandy-beached. The canoe, its slender nose thrust into the pebbles and white sand, held there, swaying gently. Before Farley could move, the girl was out, standing in the shallow water, her left hand steadying the boat while her right reached out to help him.
“If you feel strong enough, it’s only a little way, and you will rest better.”
Ashamed of his weakness in the face of her confident young strength, he got to his feet. Already it was a harder thing for him to stand than it had been ten minutes ago. His right shoulder, side and arm were utterly useless. His leg, when he put a little of his weight upon it, pained him so that with his lip caught sharply between his teeth it cost him much to keep back a cry of agony.
But in the end, leaning upon her, her arm tight about him, he got into the water and to the strip of sand. Looking anxiously for some sort of camp, he saw ahead only a thick grove of pine and fir like the one they had passed, and the sheer cliffs beyond.
“I think,” she was saying to him, “that if you rest again you will only be the stiffer, sorer for it. Can you manage to walk a little further?”
He nodded. And now he staggered on with his guide and into the trees. And when at last she stopped he again looked up, expecting to see the camp. Instead, he saw that they had brought up at the edge of the level strip with the cliff-wall in front of them.
“We’re going up there,” she answered the puzzled look in his eyes. “It isn’t as hard as it looks. Can you go a little further?”
He nodded again painfully. So again they moved on, ten feet along the cliffs, and came, unexpectedly for him, upon a great, gently slanting cut in the rocks, into which bits of stone had been flung so as to make rude, rough steps. It was harder now, slower; for he had to lift his left foot each time, while she helped relieve the weight upon the other, and wearily pull himself up. Ten minutes dragged by before they had climbed the twenty feet.
Upon the top was a plateau perhaps a mile long, broken with trees and boulders, five hundred yards wide. The fringe of trees and ragged cliffs upon the side toward the lake hid the tableland completely from that direction. And, set between two gnarled cedars, at the very edge of a dense bit of the forest where it ran out from the sea of verdure like a cape, was a low, rambling log cabin, a thin spiral of smoke winding up from its stone chimney. Here was “home.”