The rest of the journey, lasting nearly an hour longer, was a ceaseless succession of rapids, with scant and few spaces of quiet water between. None were quite so long and violent as the first; but by the time the canoe slowed up in the reach of still water that ran through the interval meadow of Gabe’s clearing, Miranda felt fagged from the long-sustained excitement. She felt as if it had been she, not Dave, whose unerring eye and unfailing wrist had brought the canoe in triumph through the menace of the roaring races.
They landed on the blossoming meadow strip, and Dave turned the canoe over among the grasses, under the shade of an elm that would serve to keep the afternoon sun from melting the rosin off the seams. Gabe’s cabin stood a stone’s throw back from the meadow, high enough up the slope to be clear of the spring freshets. It was a bare, uncared-for place, with black stumps still dotting all the fields of buckwheat and potatoes, a dishevelled-looking barn, and no vine or bush about the house. It gave Miranda a pang of pity to look at it. Her own cabin was lonely enough, but with a high, austere, clear loneliness that seemed to hold communion with the stars. The loneliness of this place was a shut-in, valley loneliness, without horizons and without hope. She felt sorry almost to tears for the white and sad-eyed woman who appeared in the cabin door to welcome them.
“Sary Ann, this is Mirandy I spoke to ye about.”
The two women shook hands somewhat shyly, and, after the silent fashion of their race, said nothing.
“How’s Jimmy?” asked Dave.
“’Baout the same, thank ye, Dave,” replied the woman, wearily, leading the way into the cabin.
In a low chair near the window, playing listlessly with a dingy red-and-yellow rag doll, sat a thin-faced, pallid little boy with long, pale curls down on his shoulders. He lifted sorrowful blue eyes to Miranda’s face, as she, with a swift impulse of tenderness and compassion, rushed forward and knelt down to embrace him. Her vitality and the loving brightness of her look won the child at once. His wan little face lightened. He lifted the baby mouth to be kissed. Miranda pressed his fair head to her bosom gently, and had much ado to keep her eyes from running over, so worked the love and pity and the mothering hunger in her heart.
“He takes to ye, Mirandy,” said the woman, smiling upon her. And Dave, his passion almost mastering him, blurted out proudly,—
“An’ who wouldn’t take to her, I’d like to know?”
He felt at this moment that Miranda was now all human, and could never quite go back to her mystic and uncanny wildness, her preference for the speechless, furry kin over her own warm, human kind. He produced the medicine from his satchel; and from Miranda’s attentive hand Jimmy took the stuff as if it had been nectar. Jimmy’s mother looked on with undisguised approval of the girl. Had she thought Miranda was going to stay any length of time, her mother-jealousy would have been aroused; but as it was she was only exquisitely relieved at the thought of Jimmy’s being in some one else’s care for a few hours. She whispered audibly—a mere chaffing pretence of a whisper it was—to Dave:—