"Lord! No! Not my style at all!"
"Didn't you know any girls in New York?"
"Nary a one!"
"That is too bad! But at your other college you have fun?"
"McGill, yes, plenty doing there."
"Nice girls?"
"Rather! Plenty of 'em. Dear little things!"
A pause here while Nahnya bit the thread with her sharp teeth, and
took up the other moccasin. "What is plenty?" she said with a little
air of scorn. "There is always one."
"Not for me," Ralph said. "I rushed the bunch."
"Where was your home, Ralph; where you were born?"
"At Millersville in Ontario. One of those sleepy little burgs with a
brick Odd Fellows' Hall with blue shades, a Royal Hotel on the corner,
and cracked cement sidewalks. They're all alike."
[Illustration: "_Ralph never guessed he was being searched through and
through by a woman's loving, jealous curiosity_"]
Nahnya had a score of questions to ask about his home and his family.
Ralph, as his eyes softened with recollection, grew more outrageously
facetious. Nahnya, glancing at him through her lashes, understood.
Finally, threading a needle with an elaborately careless air, she
remarked:
"I guess you liked the Millersville girls best."
"Print dresses and rosy cheeks," said Ralph dreamily. "Short on fine
clothes and long on health and good nature! Choir practice and school
picnics and country dances! That was good! There was a girl there----"
"Ah!"
"Patty Lake her name was. We called her Pattycake. She was sweet.
Always wore pink, and had two fat, brown braids hanging down her back."
"Well?" a little breathlessly.
"Married the butcher's boy, that's all."
There were many breaks and pauses in this conversation. So off-hand
was Nahnya's manner, and such her preoccupation with the needle, that
Ralph never guessed he was being searched through and through by a
woman's loving, jealous curiosity.
The little black book continued:
"When we left our grassy point and paddled around the big curve in
McIlwraith Lake, suddenly we hove in sight of half a dozen whitewashed
huts on the shore. And a flag-pole with a flag against the blue! Gave
me a regular thrill. The Hudson's Bay Company uses the Union Jack with
the letters H.B.C. in white. The fellows up here say it stands for
'Here Before Christ.' As we paddled by, a white man came out of the
store and hailed us. Nahnya wouldn't stop. 'Ask too much questions,'
she said. This was Fort McIlwraith that I have heard of.
"Immediately afterward we got in the river again. It is deeper and
swifter after every lake. Here it is called the Pony River, Nahnya
says. There were some ugly snags. Nahnya is a wonder with the paddle.
We camped in the middle of a wide, burned-over stretch. It was like a
farm-field. You kept looking around for fences and cattle, and a house
somewhere.
"Next morning the river slowed up and lost itself among a lot of low
islands covered with gigantic cottonwood trees. You could see there
was a change coming. As we paddled around the end of an island, me all
unawares, we were snatched up--snatched is the word--by a violent green
current that raced us down half a mile, and wet us in a rapid before I
got my bearings.
"Nahnya says this is the Rice River. It is half a dozen times as big
as the Pony. It is a thick, yellowish-green colour like jade, and a
funny hissing sound comes up from the surface. Nahnya says it is made
by the stones chasing along the stony bottom. It is a gaunt, ragged,
bad-tempered looking stream, always gnawing under its banks and
bringing the trees down on the run, and then piling the debris in
untidy heaps on naked pebble bars in the middle. The cut-banks are
astonishing--some of them a hundred feet high, the trees looking like
toys along the top edge, waiting their turn to fall over. Out of these
smooth slopes, naked as railway embankments, harder strata of earth
stick up like castles, with millions of swallows building in them.
"We camped in another burned-out place. This is the loneliest spot on
earth almost, and even here man has left his dirty work. The man, red
or white, who is responsible for a fire ought to be drawn and
quartered. It's ghastly. Nahnya has put the fear of God into Charley.
Last thing before we move on she makes him haul water until every spark
is quenched. Mosquitoes bad to-night.
"Couldn't sleep. This violent, ugly river, and the ghastly burned-over
country, and other things gave me the willies. A brute of a bird flew
in circles over the tent half the night, uttering a single croaking
note like a cracked funeral bell. Lord! we're a long way off from
folks! Fancy Charley and Nahnya taking these trips by themselves. She
sleeps like a baby, without ever moving or missing a breath.
"Next day. The old river doesn't look so bad with the sun shining on
it. Saw three bears as we went flying down. How does anybody get up
this current I wonder. You can't always be going down-stream. Nothing
but cut-banks, bars, drift-piles, and vicious little rapids on the
bends. Eagles sailing like aeroplanes overhead, and screaming as if
they had steel springs in their throats.
"Third day on the Rice River. We have come nearly two hundred miles on
this stream, I guess, and not a soul, red or white, not a hut, nor the
remains of a hut all the way. The current seems to be slackening, and
we lose ourselves in a mess of islands; so I suppose there is something
saving for us ahead. This is the sixth day from Gisborne, so we ought
to arrive there to-morrow, wherever and whatever 'there' is."
The entries in the little black book ended with these words.
Ralph's diary confined itself discreetly to the visual aspects of the
journey, avoiding the psychological. All was not smooth sailing here
of course. Ralph was keeping a tight hold on himself that entailed no
little nervous strain, and he was apt to break out unreasonably.
Nahnya, while generally friendly, had an exasperating way of relapsing
at any time into the mysterious inscrutability which maddened him.
Only Charley was always the same.
On the afternoon of the third day on the Rice River, after one of the
colloquies in Cree with her brother that always irritated Ralph, Nahnya
suddenly brought the dugout around in the current, and grounded it on a
shelving, stony beach. Charley got out and pulled it up.
"What's this for?" said Ralph, surprised. "It isn't but an hour since
we ate."
Nahnya affected not to hear him.
Ralph instantly flew into a passion. "Oh, very well!" he cried. "If
you want to be mysterious!"
He strode off and sat down by himself on a drift-log, dignified and
sore. He filled his pipe with care, and lighted it. It tasted bad,
and he put it back in his pocket.
Nahnya brought cold victuals ashore, and she and Charley sat down
together. Ralph, watching out of the corner of his eye, had at least
the satisfaction of seeing that she could not eat. She sat with her
hands in her lap, unusual for her. He could not see her face.
Charley, who could always eat, stuffed himself with moose-meat and cold
bannock.
When Charley had eaten as much as he could hold, he carried the remains
back to the dugout and put them away. He returned to Nahnya with a
coil of light, strong cord in his hands, a tracking-line. Holding it
out toward her, he said something in Cree.
To Ralph's astonishment Nahnya sprang up in a rage, snatched the line
out of Charley's hands, and soundly boxed his ears. A pretty family
quarrel resulted. Charley, thunderstruck at first, answered back in
tones of resentful injury. More than once Ralph heard his own name,
and wondered mightily what he had to do with it.
Charley flung off, and sat down by himself, and there were the three of
them up and down the beach, perfectly sore and unhappy; Ralph in
addition mystified by it all.
Ralph was the first to give in. "Oh, I say, this is too ridiculous!"
he cried. "Nahnya, come here!"
She went to him with a face like a mask of bronze.
"What's the matter, Nahnya?" he demanded to know. "We're all acting
like children!"
She shrugged slightly, and looked away.
Seeing that he would get nothing out of her this way, he changed his
tone. "For my part I'm sorry I lost my temper," he said warmly.
"Honest, I am."
This told. She frowned and looked uncomfortable; sure sign, as he knew
by now, that her feelings were touched.
"We were always going to be friends," he said, following up his
advantage. "Is this being friends? What's the matter, Nahnya?"
To his surprise he saw her eyes begin to fill. She made to turn from
him, but he caught her wrists and forced her to face him. "Nahnya, I
am your friend," he said.
She angrily shook the tears from her eyes. "I one fool!" she muttered.
"Like a white woman, I cry when I need sense!"
"What's the matter?" repeated Ralph.
"Let me go!" she said.
He released her.
"I think you going to hate me by and by," she said.
"Why should I hate you?" he demanded.
She gave him an extraordinary look, at once determined and deprecating,
and said a little breathlessly: "Ralph, I got to tie your eyes, now."
"Blindfold me?" cried Ralph, amazed. "What for?"
"You must not see where we go now."
"But I gave you my word!" cried Ralph. "I promised I'd say nothing of
where I had been or of what I had seen."
"I know," she said, "you will keep your promise. But you must not come
back yourself."
Ralph stared at her as if she were a witch. Thus to hit upon his
secret intention, scarcely confessed to himself!