"You—you—" Her voice was a-quiver with indignation and loathing, but her lips could not frame an epithet fit for him. He continued rowing for some time, then said:
"Will you marry me?"
"No! If this thing is ever known, Poleon will kill you—or father."
For a third time he rested on his oars.
"Now that we've come to threats, let me talk. I offered to marry you and do the square thing, but if you don't want to, I'll pass up the formality and take you for my squaw, the same as your father took Alluna. I guess you're no better than your mother, so your old man can't say much under the circumstances, and if he don't object, Poleon can't. Just remember, you're alone with me in the heart of a wilderness, and you've got to make a choice quick, because I'm going ashore and make some breakfast as soon as it's light enough to choose a landing-place. If you agree to come quietly and go through with this thing like a sensible girl, I'll do what's right, but if you don't—then I'll do what's wrong, and maybe you won't be so damned anxious to tell your friends about this trip, or spread your story up and down the river. Make up your mind before I land."
The water gurgled at the bow again, and the row-locks squeaked. Another hour and then another passed in silence before the girl noted that she no longer seemed to float through abysmal darkness, but that the river showed in muddy grayness just over the gunwale. She saw Runnion more clearly, too, and made out his hateful outlines, though for all else she beheld they might have been miles out upon a placid sea, and so imperceptible was the laggard day's approach that she could not measure the growing light. It was a desolate dawn, and showed no glorious gleams of color. There was no rose-pink glow, no merging of a thousand tints, no final burst of gleaming gold; the night merely faded away, changing to a sickly pallor that grew to ashen gray, and then dissolved the low-hung, distorted shadows a quarter of a mile inland on either hand into a forbidding row of unbroken forest backed by plain, morass, and distant hills untipped by slanting rays. Overhead a bleak ruin of clouds drifted; underneath the river ran, a bilious yellow. The whole country so far as the eye could range was unmarred by the hand of man, untracked save by the feet of the crafty forest people.
She saw Runnion gazing over his shoulder in search of a shelving beach or bar, his profile showing more debased and mean than she had ever noticed it before. They rounded a bend where the left bank crumbled before the untiring teeth of the river, forming a bristling chevaux-de-frise of leaning, fallen firs awash in the current. The short side of the curve, the one nearest them, protected a gravel bar that made down-stream to a dagger-like point, and towards this Runnion propelled the skiff. The girl's heart sank and she felt her limbs grow cold.
The mind of Poleon Doret worked in straight lines. Moreover, his memory was good. Stark's statement, which so upset Gale and the Lieutenant, had a somewhat different effect upon the Frenchman, for certain facts had been impressed upon his subconsciousness which did not entirely gibe with the gambler's remarks, and yet they were too dimly engraved to afford foundation for a definite theory. What he did know was this, that he doubted. Why? Because certain scraps of a disjointed conversation recurred to him, a few words which he had overheard in Stark's saloon, something about a Peterborough canoe and a woman. He knew every skiff that lay along the waterfront, and of a sudden he decided to see if this one was where it had been at dusk; for there were but two modes of egress from Flambeau, and there was but one canoe of this type. If Necia had gone up-river on the freighter, pursuit was hopeless, for no boatman could make headway against the current; but if, on the other hand, that cedar craft was gone—He ran out of Stark's house and down to the river-bank, then leaped to the shingle beneath. It was just one chance, and if he was wrong, no matter; the others would leave on the next up-river steamer; whereas, if his suspicion proved a certainty, if Stark had lied to throw them off the track, and Runnion had taken her down-stream—well, Poleon wished no one to hinder him, for he would travel light.
The boat WAS gone! He searched the line backward, but it was not there, and his excitement grew now, likewise his haste. Still on the run, he stumbled up to the trading-post and around to the rear, where, bottom up, lay his own craft, the one he guarded jealously, a birch canoe, frail and treacherous for any but a man schooled in the ways of swift water and Indian tricks. He was very glad now that he had not told the others of his suspicions; they might have claimed the right to go, and of that he would not be cheated. He swung the shell over his shoulders, then hurried to the bank and down the steep trail like some great, misshapen turtle. He laid it carefully in the whispering current, then stripped himself with feverish haste, for the driving call of a hot pursuit was on him, and although it was the cold, raw hours of late night, he whipped off his garments until he was bare to the middle. He seized his paddle, stepped in, then knelt amidships and pushed away. The birch-bark answered him like a living thing, leaping and dancing beneath the strokes which sprung the spruce blade and boiled the water to a foam, while rippling, rising ridges stood out upon his back and arms as they rose and fell, stretched and bent and straightened.
A half-luminous, opaque glow was over the waters, but the banks quickly dropped away, until there was nothing to guide him but the suck of the current and the sight of the dim-set stars. His haste now became something crying that lashed him fiercely, for he seemed to be standing still, and so began to mutter at the crawling stream and to complain of his thews, which did not drive him fast enough, only the sound he made was more like the whine of a hound in leash or a wolf that runs with hot nostrils close to the earth.