She had slept perhaps half an hour when a crow, alighting on a low branch some half score paces distant, peered into the shade of the beech-tree and discovered the sweet picture. To him it was not sweet in the least, but indubitably interesting. "Cah—ah!" he exclaimed loudly, hopping up and down in his astonishment. The sharp voice awoke Barbara, and she rubbed her eyes.
"Gracious!" she exclaimed to the kittens, "what sleepyheads we are! Come, come, we must hurry up, or we'll never get to Uncle Bob!"
Before she was really well awake, the kittens were in the basket, the canoe was loaded and shoved off, and the adventurers were once more afloat upon their quest. Then only did Barbara give herself time to stretch and rub her eyes. After a few strokes she let the canoe drift with the current, while she laid down the paddle, and cooled her wrists and refreshed her face with handfuls of water.
As she straightened her brave little shoulders again to her labour, she was arrested by a strange sound as of the ripping of bark. It was an ominous kind of noise in the lonely stillness, and apprehensively she peered in the direction whence it came. Then she grew afraid. On the other shore, about a couple of rods back from the water, she saw a large black bear sitting upon its haunches beside a fallen and rotten tree. As she stared, wide-eyed and trembling, he lifted his great paw and laid hold of the dead bark. Again came the ripping, tearing noise, and off peeled a huge brown slab. To the exposed surface he applied a nimble tongue—and Barbara's terror subsided. She saw that he was quite too absorbed in the delights of an ant-log to pay any attention to a mere girl; and she remembered, too, that the black bear was a rather inoffensive soul so long as he was not treated contumeliously. For all this, however, she made as much haste from the spot as was consistent with a noiseless paddle—and kept furtive watch over her shoulder until she had put a good half-mile between the canoe and the ant-log.
By the time her concern about the bear had begun to flag she found that the current was quickening its pace. The trees slipped by more swiftly, and the shores grew bolder. A mellow, roaring clamour came to her ears, and with delicious trepidation she remembered a little rapid through which she must pass. Around a turn of the stream it came into view, its small waves sparkling where the forest gave back and admitted the afternoon sun. Her experience in running rapids had been slight, but she remembered the course which Uncle Bob had taken, between two large rocks where the water ran deep and smooth; and she called to mind, the further to brace her confidence, that Uncle Bob had stigmatised this particular rapid as mere child's play. Her heart beat rather wildly as she entered the broken water, and the currents gripped her, and the banks began to flee upward past her view. But her eye held true and her wrist firm. The clamour filled her ears, but she laid her course with precision and fetched the very centre of the channel between the big rocks. From that point all was clear. The canoe went racing through the last ripple, which splashed her lightly as she passed; and in a reach of quiet water, foam-flecked and shining, she drew a deep breath of triumph. This, indeed, was to live. Never had she experienced a keener consciousness of power. She felt her enterprise already successful. The ancient woods, with their bears, their porcupines, their wide-winged brown owls, lay behind her. Second Westings was incalculably far away. There in plain view, rising over its comfortable orchard trees, not half a mile distant, were the roofs and chimneys of Gault House, overlooking, as she had heard, the waters of the great river. And beyond the next turn, as she thought with a thrill, she would see the great river itself.
CHAPTER VIII.
Barbara rounded the next turn. There before her, widely gleaming, spread the waters of the great river itself. She cried out in her joy, and paddled madly—then paused, abashed, perceiving that she was the object of a critical but frankly admiring scrutiny. Her attention was diverted from the great river. Here was a tall boy—of her own caste unmistakably—poling himself out on a precarious little raft to meet her. Her flush of confusion passed as quickly as it had come, and laying her paddle across the gunwale, she waited with interest to discover what he might have to say.
Barbara had met but few boys of her own class, and those few had seemed, under her merciless analysis, uniformly uninteresting. Their salient characteristics, to her mind, were freckles, rudeness, ignorance, and a disposition to tease cats. But this youth was obviously different. Apparently about seventeen years of age, he was tall and graceful, and the way the clumsy log-raft on which he stood surged forward under the thrusts of his pole revealed his strength. Barbara loved strength, so long as delicacy saved it from coarseness. The boy was in his shirt sleeves, which were of spotless cambric, and Barbara noted, with approbation, the ample ruffles turned back, for convenience, from his sinewy brown hands. She observed that his brown, long-fronted, flowered vest was of silk, and his lighter brown small-clothes of a fine cloth worn only by the gentry; that his stockings were of black silk, and his shoes, drenched most of the time in the water that lapped over the raft, were adorned with large buckles of silver. She admired the formal fashion in which his black hair was tied back in a small and very precise queue. But most of all she liked his face, which was even darker than her own—lean, somewhat square in the jaw, with a broad forehead, and gray-blue, thoughtful eyes, set wide apart.
Now, Barbara's fearless scorn of conventions was equalled only by her ignorance of them. This boy pleased her, so why should she hesitate to show it? When the raft ranged up alongside the canoe, she laid hold upon it for anchorage and the greater convenience in conversation, and flashed upon the stranger the full dazzle of her scarlet lips, white teeth, and bewildering radiance of green eyes. The boy straightened himself from the pole in order to bow with the more ceremony—which he accomplished to Barbara's complete satisfaction in spite of the unsteadiness of the raft.