He had recognized the answering voice and flung his excited greeting in a tumult of feeling.
The canoes drove head on for the river bank.
As Belton and Ross sought to discover the nature of their freight the coursing blood of excited hope stagnated. There was only the quickening of apprehension.
A grim, strange figure was confronting them. It was kneeling up in the prow of the nearest vessel. A wild, straining, desperate light shone feverishly in eyes looking out of a face lost in a tangle of beard and whisker. The brows were fiercely depressed, suggesting a bitter defensive spirit. The eyes were lost in cavernous sockets, and the cheeks were sunken and scored with lines of ravening hunger. The whole was clad in the discoloured buckskin of a Northern Indian, with a mat of untended hair reaching to its shoulders.
The waiting men understood. This was their comrade, the man to whose succour they had rushed. A tragic story of suffering was in that single figure, which, paddle in hand, was battling with a burden too great for any one man to bear. Only he, and the squat figures of Shaunekuk paddlers were to be seen. For the rest nothing was visible to the onlookers.
As the canoe grounded on the reed-grown mud the doctor's deep-voiced "Thank God!" met with no response. The wild-looking figure scrambled off the boat, and plunged nearly knee-deep into the mud. Those on the bank seemed to concern him not at all, for he turned, as was perhaps his long habit, to haul the vessel inshore himself.
But the rescue party forestalled him. The men from the bank, policemen and Indian scouts, seized the boat, while Ross's friendly hand was laid on the man's shoulder.
"The boys'll fix things," he said, in a voice deep with intense feeling. "Best come right up to camp, Steve."
The sound of the husky voice, whose words were not quite steady, brought a swift turn from Steve. For a moment he stared at the speaker. He seemed to be striving to restore the broken threads of memory. Finally he shook his head.