"Au large!" I said to my Indian, and swept the birchen craft out into the deep and steady current.
CHAPTER XXIV
GREEN-COATS
Nothing stirred on the Drowned Lands as we drove our canoe at top speed between tall bronzed stalks of rushes and dead water-weeds. Vlaie Water was intensely blue and patched with golden débris of floating stuff—shreds of cranberry vine, rotting lily pads, and the like—and in twenty minutes we floated silently into the Spring Pool, opposite the Stacking Ridge, where hard earth bordered both shores and where maples and willows were now in lusty bud.
Two miles away, against Maxon's sturdy bastion, a vast quantity of smoke was writhing upward in dark and cloudy convolutions. I could not see Fish House—that oblong, unpainted building a story and a half in height, with its chimneys of stone and the painted fish weather vane swimming in the sky. But I was convinced that it was afire.
We beached our canoe and drew it under the shore-reeds, and so passed rapidly down the right bank of the stream along the quick water, holding our guns cocked and primed, like hunters ready for a hazard shot at sight.
There was no snow left; all frost was out of the ground along the Drowned Lands; and the earth was sopping wet. Everywhere frail green spears of new grass pricked the dead and matted herbage; and in sheltered places tiny green leaves embroidered stems and twigs; and I saw wind-flowers, and violets both yellow and blue, and the amber shoots of skunk cabbage growing thickly in wet places. The shadbush, too, was in exquisite white bloom along the stream, and I remember that I saw one tree in full flower, and a dozen bluejays sitting amid the snowy blossoms like so many lumps of sapphire.
Now, on the mainland, a clearing showed in the sunshine; and beyond it I saw a rail fence bounding a field still black and wet from last autumn's plowing.
We took to the brush and bore to the right, where on firm ground a grove of ash and butternut forested the ridge, and a sandy path ran through.