The canoe did not answer to Ann's one slim Indian paddle so lightly as
the boat she had taken before had answered to the oars. Kneeling upright
in the stern, she was obliged to keep her body in perfect balance.
The moon did not rise now until late, but the smoke that had for two
days hung so still and dim had been lifted on a light breeze that came
with the darkness. The stars were clear above, and Ann's eyes were well
accustomed to the wood and stream.
Ah! how long it seemed before she came round the bend of the river and
down to the blasted tree. She felt a repulsion for the whole death-like
place to-night that she had not felt before. She had been sure the
other night of meeting some one at the end of her secret journey, and
now the best she could hope was that the place would be empty; and even
if it were empty, perhaps, for all she knew, one of the men for whom she
was seeking might be lying dead in the water beneath. Certainly the
inexplicable appearance of her father the night before had shaken her
nerves. Ann was doing a braver thing than she had ever done in her life,
because she was a prey to terror. Lonely as the desolate Ahwewee was, to
turn from it into the windings of the secret opening seemed like leaving
the world behind and going alone into a region of death. There was no
sound but the splash of paddle, the ripple of the still water under the
canoe, the occasional voice of a frog from the swampy edges of the lake,
and the shrill murmur of crickets from the dry fields beyond.
When Ann came near she saw the bound figure reclining in the arms of the
fallen tree. Then she believed that her worst fear had been true--that
Bart had been unfaithful, and that her father had died in this wretched
place. He must be dead because she had seen his spirit!
She came nearer. He had not died of starvation; the bag of food which
she had hung upon the branch hung there yet. She set the canoe close
against the tree, and, holding by the tree, raised herself in it. She
had to be very careful lest the canoe should tip under her even while
she held by the tree. Then she put forth a brave hand, and laid it upon
the breast of the unconscious man.
He was not dead. The heart was beating, though not strongly; the body
was warm.
"Father, father." She shook him gently.
The answer was a groan, very feeble. It told her at once that the man
before her was stricken with some physical ill that made him incapable
of responding to her.
And now what was she to do? It was necessary by some means to get her
father into the canoe. To that she did not give a second thought, but
while he still lived it seemed to her monstrous to take him either back
to Fentown Falls or down to The Mills. Her horror of prison and of
judgment for him had grown to be wholly morbid and unreasonable, just
because his terror of it had been so extreme. Only one course remained.
She had the chart that David Brown had given her. He had told her that
at that northern edge of the swamp, which could be reached by the way he
had marked out, a small farmhouse stood. Possibly the people in this
house might not yet have heard of Markham the murderer; or possibly, if
they had heard, they might be won for pity's sake to let him regain
strength there and go in peace. It was her only chance. The moon was
rising now, and she would find the way. She felt strength to do anything
when she had realised that the heart beneath her hand was still beating.
Ann moved the canoe under the fallen log, and moving down it upon her
knees, she took the rope from the prow, secured it round the log from
which the sick man must descend, and fastened it again to the other end
of the boat. This at least was a guarantee that they could not all sink
together. Even yet the danger of upsetting the canoe sideways was very
great. It was only necessity that enabled her to accomplish her task.
"Father, rouse yourself a little." She took Markham's old felt hat, upon
which the insensible head was lying, and set it warmly over his brow.
She unfastened the bands that tied his body to the log. She had not come
without a small phial of the rum that was always necessary for her
father, in the hope that she might find him alive. She soaked some
morsels of bread in this, and put it in the mouth of the man over whom
she was working. It was very dark; the only marvel was, not that she did
not recognise Toyner, but that she and he were not both engulfed in the
black flood beneath them in the struggle which she made to take him in
the canoe.
Twice that day Toyner had stirred and become conscious; but
consciousness, except that of confused dreams, had again deserted him.
The lack of food, if it had preserved him from fever, had caused the
utmost weakness of all his bodily powers; yet when the small amount of
bread and rum which he could swallow gave him a little strength, he was
roused, not to the extent of knowing who he was or where, but enough to
move his muscles, although feebly, under direction. After a long time
she had him safely in the bottom of the canoe, his head lying upon her
jacket which she had folded for a pillow. At first, as she began to
paddle the canoe forward, he groaned again and again, but by degrees the
reaction of weakness after exertion made him lapse into his former state
that seemed like sleep.
Ann had lost now all her fears of unknown and unseen dangers. All that
she feared was the loss of her way, or the upsetting of her boat. The
strength that she put into the strokes of her paddle was marvellous. She
had just a mile to go before she came to another place where a stretch
of still water opened through the trees. There were several of these
blind channels opening off the bed of the Ahwewee. They were the terror
of those who were travelling in boats, for they were easily mistaken for
the river itself, and they led to nothing but impenetrable marsh. From
this particular inlet David Brown had discovered a passage to the land,
and Ann pursued the new untried way boldly. Somewhere farther on David
had told her a little creek flowed in where the eye could not discern
any wider opening than was constantly the case between the drowned
trees. Its effect upon the current of the water was said to be so slight
that the only way to discover where it ran was by throwing some light
particles upon the water and watching to see whether they drifted
outwards from the wood steadily. She turned the boat gently against a
broken stump from which she could take a decaying fragment. An hour
passed. She wearily crossed the water to and fro, casting out her chips
of punk, straining her eyes to see their motion in the moonlight. The
breeze that had moved the smoke had gone again. Above the moon rode
through white fleecy clouds. The water and air lay still and warm,
inter-penetrated with the white light. The trees, without leaf or twigs,
cast no shadow with the moon in the zenith.
The patient experimenting with the chips was a terrible ordeal to Ann.
The man whom she supposed to be her father lay almost the whole length
of the canoe so close to her, and yet she could not pass his
outstretched feet to give him food or stimulant. At last, at last, to
her great joy, she found the place where the chips floated outward with
steady motion. She then pushed her canoe in among the trees, thankful to
know that it, at least, had been there before, that there would be no
pass too narrow for it. The canoe itself was almost like a living
creature to her by this time. Like an intelligent companion in the
search, it responded with gentle motion to her slightest touch.
It seemed to Ann that the light of the moon was now growing very strong
and clear. Surely no moon had ever before become so bright! Ann looked
about her, almost for a moment dreading some supernatural thing, and
then she realised that the night was gone, that pale dawn was actually
smiling upon her. It gave her a strange sense of lightheartedness. Her
heart warmed with love to the sight of the purple tint in the eastern
sky, that bluish purple which precedes the yellow sunrise. On either
side of her boat now the water was so shallow that sedge and rushes rose
above it.
The herons flapped across her path to their morning fishing.
The creek still made a narrow channel for the canoe. Pretty soon its
current flowed between wild undulating tracts of bright green moss in
which the trees still stood dead, but bark and lichen now adhered to
their trunks, and a few more strokes brought her to the fringes of young
spruce and balsam that grew upon the drier knolls. She smelt living
trees, dry woods and pastures in front. Then a turn of the narrow creek,
and she saw a log-house standing not twenty paces from the stream. Above
and around it maples and elms held out green branches, and there was
some sort of a clearing farther on.
Ann felt exultant in her triumph. She had brought her boat to a place of
safety. She seemed to gather life and strength from the sun; although it
still lay below the blue horizon of lake and forest which she had left
behind her, the sky above was a gulf of sunshine.
She stepped out of the boat and pushed away the hat to look in her
father's face. She saw now who it was that she had rescued. Toyner
stirred a little when she touched him, and opened his eyes, the same
grave grey eyes with which he had looked at her when he bade her
good-bye. There was no fever in them, and, as it seemed to her, no lack
of sense and thought. Yet he only looked at her gravely, and then seemed
to sleep again.
The girl sprang upright upon the bank and wrung her hands together. It
came to her with sudden clearness what had been done. Had Toyner told
his tale, she could hardly have known it more clearly. Her father, had
tried to murder Bart; her father had tied him in his own place; it was
her father who had escaped alone with the boat. It was he himself, and
no apparition, who had peered in upon her through the window. She was
wrought up into a strong glow of indignation against the baseness that
would turn upon a deliverer, against the cruelty of the revenge taken.
No wonder that miserable father had not dared to enter her house again
or to seek further succour from her! All her pity, all the strength of
her generosity, went out to the man who had ventured so much on his
behalf and been betrayed. That unspoken reverence for Toyner, a sense of
the contrast between him and her father and the other men whom she knew,
which had been growing upon her, now culminated in an impulse of
devotion. A new faculty opened within her nature, a new mine of wealth.
The thin white-faced man that lay half dead in the bottom of the canoe
perhaps experienced some reviving influence from this new energy of love
that had transformed the woman who stood near him, for he opened his
eyes again and saw her, this time quite distinctly, standing looking
down upon him. There was tenderness in her eyes, and her sunbrowned face
was all aglow with a flush that was brighter than the flush of physical
exercise. About her bending figure grew what seemed to Bart's
half-dazzled sense the flowers of paradise, for wild sunflowers and
sheafs of purple eupatorium brushed her arms, standing in high phalanx
by the edge of the creek. Bart smiled as he looked, but he had no
thoughts, and all that he felt was summed up in a word that he uttered
gently:
"Ann!"
She knelt down at once. "What is it, Bart?" and again: "What were you
trying to say?"
It is probable that her words did not reach him at all. He was only
half-way back from the region of his vision; but he opened his eyes and
looked at her again.
The sun rose, and a level golden beam struck through between the trunks
of the trees, touching the flowers and branches here and there with
moving lights, and giving all the air a brighter, mellower tint. There
was something that Bart did feel a desire to say--a great thought that
at another time he might have tried in a multitude of words to have
expressed and failed. He saw Ann, whom he loved, and the paradise about
her; he wanted to bring the new knowledge that had come to him in the
light of his vision to bear upon her who belonged now to the region of
outward not of inward sight and yet was part of what must always be to
him everlasting reality.
"What were you going to say, Bart?" she asked again tenderly.
And again he summed up all that he thought and felt in one word:
"God."
"Yes, Bart," she said, with some sudden intuitive sense of agreement.
Then, seeming to be satisfied, he closed his eyes and went back into the
state of drowsiness.