At evening of a day early in August a raft landed on the beach below
Fort Cheever. It bore a middle-aged man, a girl, and a young man. The
last named ceaselessly tossed and muttered in a fever; he was strapped
to the raft to keep him from rolling off.
The older man carried him up the bank. The girl followed, tottering a
little with fatigue. There were dark circles under her eyes and her
lips were white. At the top they met David Cranston the trader, in
whose grim face surprise struggled with a welcoming courtesy. Seeing
into the sick man's face he started.
"Is it Ralph Cowdray?" he asked.
The other man nodded.
"The poor lad!" exclaimed Cranston. "He stopped here six weeks ago.
He is much changed."
"I am taking him to a doctor," the other said. "I am Jim Sholto from
Milburn Gulch. This is my daughter."
Cranston bade her welcome with clumsy, old-fashioned deference. At
Fort Cheever a white girl was like a creature from another world.
Looking at her, his grim face softened with commiseration.
To Jim he said: "There's no doctor nearer than the Crossing. I expect
the steamboat on her last trip within a week. Will you wait here for
her?"
Jim shook his head. "Too uncertain," he said. "He might die on our
hands. We will raft it down."
"Ye do well," said Cranston. "It is two hundred miles, but you can do
it easy in three days by travelling nights, too. The river is smooth
all the way. There's a kind of hotel at the Crossing where you can
make him comfortable, and the police doctor is there."
"We will go on as soon as we eat," said Jim.
"I will send the little boys to cut spruce boughs to make you
comfortable beds on the raft," said Cranston.
"Have you any remedies?" asked Jim. "We came without medicines."
"I will ask my wife," said Cranston. "She knows the simples of the
country."
"Much obliged to ye," said Jim.
"The poor lad!" said David, looking into the flushed face and the
sightless eyes. "I took a great liking to him. He had an honest way
with him." Glancing sideways at Kitty, he said: "I wondered what
brought him into the country. How did this happen?"
Jim looked at his daughter and bit his lip. The quiet tears were
rolling down Kitty's face. "He capsized in the Stanley rapids and hit
his shoulder on a rock," he said grimly. "He came to our shack much
the same as you see him now."
"Was that the first you saw of him?" asked David, in surprise.
"It was the first."
"He was in the country before. There is some strange tale behind
this," said David, wagging his head.
"I believe you," said Jim grimly.
Two months later in time, and in distance five hundred miles from Fort
Cheever, the little steamboat _Northern Belle_ was making her way
blithely down on the current of the Miwasa River on her last trip of
the season. On the upper deck Ralph, a shadow of the blooming youth
that had first set forth from Fort Edward, lay sleeping in an invalid
chair that the "boys" at the Crossing had made him for the journey.
Beside him sat Kitty, almost as pale and wasted as her patient, but
with a soft triumph in her eyes; he was safely on the mend.
He stirred and murmured her name.
"Yes?" she answered, in her quick hushed voice.
"Nothing. I just wanted to make sure you were there."
"Lazy!" she said. "Why didn't you open your eyes and look?"
"My eyelids weigh pounds!" he said. "I can sleep twenty-three and a
half hours a day!"
He lay musing for a while. "Kitty?" he said again.
"Well?" One could see "Dear!" on her lips, but it was not uttered.
"I was thinking--I'm glad I didn't hop the twig after all!"
She did not answer.
"It's just beginning to come back--the will to live, I mean."
Made curious by her continued silence, he raised his lids at last, and
saw that her eyes were big with tears. "What's the matter?" he asked
quickly.
"Nothing!" she said. "I can't help thinking--all the time you lay
there, you wished to die. In your delirium you prayed to die."
"That's funny!" he said, with an air of calm interest. "I remember
that. It was as if some force stronger than I kept me from passing
peacefully out. How it hurt!"
"Don't think about it," she said.
"It's over," he said. "The sun feels good. I feel like a new-born
babe, with everything to learn and everything to experience all over
again!"
"You've talked enough."
"Where are we?" he asked, defying her with a lazy smile.
"We will get to Miwasa landing before supper. We will stay there until
you are a little stronger. Then we'll drive the hundred miles to town
in a democrat. Father made the arrangements on his way out."
"How good you've both been to me!" murmured Ralph.
Kitty let this pass with a private smile. "I got a letter from father
at Silver landing this morning," she said. "It was posted as they were
leaving Fort Edward. They are all back at Milburn Gulch by now."
"What will they do without you?"
"They have taken a man cook in with them."
"Are you going in later?" he asked.