“P’r’aps. Dat what I tell Sherwood—but he don’t listen. He don’t care. He don’t git it, Sherwood. Too scairt. Too crazy. Tell Lunt ’bout how maybe dat stranger shoot Balenger, too. Dat when he call me a liar.”
Noel showed his visitors the exact spot in which the big pirogue had lain when Balenger had been found dead in it and explained its position and that of Balenger’s body.
Ben took a stroll by himself, leaving his uncle and the old Maliseet smoking and yarning. He walked up and down the river along the narrow strip of shore under the bank, a few hundred yards each way, trying to picture the shooting of Louis Balenger. Then he walked up and down along the top of the bank, sometimes at the edge of the tangle of trees and brush and sometimes in it, still trying to make a picture in his mind. He busied himself in this way until supper time.
Ben took to his blankets early that night and was up with the first silver lift of dawn. He left the cabin without waking the others, hurried down to the edge of the river, got out of his shirt and trousers and moccasins almost as quickly as it can be said and plunged into the cool, dark water. He swam down with the current a short way, out in midstream, then turned and breasted the smooth, strong river. There was gold in the east now but the shadows were deep under the wooded banks. Fish rose, breaking the surface of the water into flowing circles that widened and vanished. Birds chirped in the trees. Crows cawed from high roosts. Rose tinged the silver and gold in the east and the river gleamed. Ben swam slowly, with long strokes, thrilled with the wonder of the magic of water and wood and the new day.
Ben landed on the other side of the river in a level wash of sunshine and flapped his arms and hopped about on a flat rock. In a minute his blood raced warm again and his skin glowed. He was about to plunge in again for the swim down and across to Noel’s front when his attention was attracted to the bank behind and above him by a swishing and rustling in the brush.
CHAPTER VI
HOT SCENT AND WET TRAIL
Ben turned and looked upward. He saw dew-wet branches shaking, as if some one or something of considerable bulk was moving in the thick underbrush at the top of the bank. A red deer most likely, perhaps a moose, possibly a bear, he reflected. He felt thrilled. Moose and deer were not uncommon things in his experience but they always gave his heart a fine tingle. The thought of a bear was yet more thrilling.
The shaking of the brush continued. The movement was progressive. Whatever the animal was, it was descending the heavily screened bank directly toward the young man. Ben realized that if it was anything as tall as a full grown moose it would be showing a head, or ears at least, by this time. The disturbance of stems, branches and foliage descended to within five yards of him. Then the round black head of a big bear emerged from the green covert.
Ben knew that bears were not dangerous except under unusual conditions and that they were never more willing to attend to their own peaceful affairs and avoid unpleasant encounters than in the late summer of a good year for berries; and yet he felt embarrassingly defenseless as he regarded the round mask and pointed muzzle. One may derive a slight feeling of preparedness in emergency from even so little as the knowledge of being strongly shod for flight or kicking or the knowledge of being toughly garbed in flannel and homespun against minor scratches. But Ben wore neither flannel, leather nor homespun to support his morale. He decided that deep water would be the only place for him if the bear should take a fancy to the flat rock upon which he stood.
The bear was evidently puzzled and somewhat discouraged by Ben’s appearance. It stared at him for half a minute or more and Ben returned the stare. Then it withdrew its head from view and again the alders and birches and wide-boughed young spruces shook and tossed to its passage through them. But now the disturbance receded. It moved up the steep pitch of the bank and was lost to Ben’s sight in the dusk of the forest.