"It does, sure," Dave gasped. His serenity was so disturbed that, he thumped the gunwale with the paddle grip.
"Blast you," snarled the outraged Pete, "do you want him to think we're a pair of bloomin' skiff-rowers?" Dave subsided in discomfiture at the deserved reprimand.
Britton had caught the thump, and looked up.
"Ye gods," he cried, "a miracle! A miracle has come to pass!" Beneath his flippancy there ran a vibrant tone of delight.
"Yes, a miracle of exertion!" Ainsworth asserted. "I've undertaken a cursed journey for your sake, Britton; I have been pounded, devoured, and drowned in the effort to get here by the thirtieth of July. Take my word for it that I don't want another similar trip. It has been a devilish task. Ask the men!"
"It has, sure," the Chilcoot men said in one voice, without waiting to be questioned.
The Peterborough had drawn in close to the perpendicular rock upon which Rex Britton sat, and they could not then see the woman who was sitting on the lower beach near the other canoe where it rested on the bar.
"And why this haste, O prophet?" Britton laughed. "And why this trip, at all?"
"When a man buries himself alive and his resurrection becomes necessary, someone has to attend to that rising," Ainsworth said. "The someone is very often his legal adviser!"
Britton smiled with a touch of tenderness. He loved Ainsworth for his odd, swift manners of action and speech and for his unalterable fidelity. An inkling of the trend of events had come to him, but he could not show it, and Ainsworth's solicitude was comforting.