“I think we must risk it, my dear. You will go with me.” Then he said a word of caution to the guides, and called to the boys, “Come, Dicky, and you, Jackums.” They ran down the slope in haste and stood a little, made quiet for once in their noisy lives, but interested, alert, and peering through the darkness.
“Is that you, Tom and Ambrose? How are you all? and Pierre—have you kept me a big salmon?”
He shook hands with each of the guides, having a gay word of kindly remembrance for all in turn. Meanwhile the sister of the boys came down to the canoes, made silent, like the children, by the night, the pervasive stillness, and the novelty of the situation.
“Baggage gone up, Pierre?”
“Yes, Mr. Lyndsay; everything is right,—and the salmon thick as pine-needles. The small traps are all in. We might be getting away.”
“Shall the women need their waterproofs, Tom?”—this to a huge form which loomed large as it moved among the other men, who were busy adjusting the small freight of hand baggage. The voice, when it broke out in reply, was, even for a fellow of six feet two, of unproportioned loudness.
“They won’t want none; it ’s a-goin’ to bust out clear.”
Miss Anne Lyndsay, the maiden aunt of the children, came down the bank as Thunder Tom replied. Her steps, too feeble for health, were thoughtfully aided by Edward, the youngest boy. To her turned Rose, the niece, a woman of twenty years.
“Did you ever hear the like?”
She felt the queer impropriety of this terrible voice in the solemn stillness which, somehow, adequately suggested the tribute of the bated breath.