"I'll tell you the reason this boat don't go," he said, gravely, "the rope was all twisted. I've straightened it out, and taken off the straws."
A burst of laughter greeted him as he turned around his face, still grave, but his dark eyes, roving from one to another, their laughing expression hidden in the shadow, for the moon was behind him.
"What a useful member of society you are, Stephen," cried Katie Archdale. "I don't see how we could get on without you."
"I don't think we're getting on with him very fast," remarked a young gentleman sitting opposite Katie, pointing significantly at a curve of the shore that they had not drifted out of sight of in the last half hour.
"At least he has roused us," returned the girl, "for I half believe I was sleepy before."
"I believe it wholly," answered Stephen, taking his seat beside her again and looking down into her face teazingly with a cousinly freedom. But it was not altogether a cousinly regard from which Katie drew back after a moment, tossing her head coquettishly, and with a heightened color, glancing past at her friend beyond him, who sat dipping one hand in the water and looking dreamily at the shore. Stephen Archdale and his cousin Katie lived within a few miles of each [83] other, and there had always been constant intercourse between their families. When boy and girl, Stephen, four years the elder, the two had played together, and they had grown up, as people said, like brother and sister. But of late it was rumored that the conduct of young Archdale was more loverlike than brotherly, and that, if Katie choose, the tie between them would one day be closer than that of cousinhood. The stranger who sat opposite Archdale, watching them both in silence, was of the same opinion. He was rather portly for his age, which could not have been over thirty, and as he sat in the boat he looked a taller man than he proved to be when on his feet. His dark-brown beard was full, his eyes, like Archdale's, were in shadow, for he had drawn down his hat well over his brows, while Stephen and young Waldo sat bareheaded in the August air.
"I wonder"—began Katie.
"A sturgeon!" cried Mrs. Eveleigh, the last member of the party.
But the sound proved the soft dip of the paddle in the water as a canoe came toward them going down the stream. Its Indian occupant when he shot by turned his gaze stealthily upon the gay party.
"How many more of your red savages are there coming to spy upon us?" And the speaker pushed back his hat a trifle, and looked up and down the river with an anxiety that he could not quite conceal.