Next morning they saw the dug-out pulled up on the shore below their camp.

“The difference between a red man and a white man,” said Stonor grimly, “is that a red man doesn’t mind being caught in a lie after the occasion for it has passed, but a white man will spend half the rest of his life trying to justify himself.”

He regarded the craft dubiously. It was an antique affair, grey as an old badger, warped and seamed by the sun and rotten in the bottom. But it had a thin skin of sound wood on the outside, and on the whole it seemed better suited to their purpose than the bark-canoes used by the Kakisas.

As they carried their goods down and made ready to start the Indians gathered around and watched with glum faces. None offered to help. It must have been a trying situation for Mary Moosa. When Stonor was out of hearing they did not spare her. She bore it with her customary stoicism. Ahchoogah, less honest than the rank and file, sought to commend himself to the policeman by a pretence of friendliness. Stonor, beyond telling him that he would hold him responsible for the safety of the horses during his absence, ignored him.

Having stowed their outfit, they gingerly got in. Their boat, though over twenty feet long, was only about fifteen inches beam, and of the log out of which she had been fashioned she still retained the tendency to roll over. Mary took the bow paddle, and Stonor the stern; Clare sat amidships facing the policeman.

“If we can only keep on top until we get around the first bend we’ll save our dignity, anyhow,” said Stonor.

They pushed off without farewells. When they rounded the first point of willows and passed out of sight of the crowd of lowering, dark faces, they felt relieved. Stonor was able to drop the port of august policeman.

Said he: “I’m going to call this craft the Serpent. She’s got a fair twist on her. Her head is pointed to port and her tail to starboard. It takes a mathematical deduction to figure out which way she’s going.”

Clare was less ready than usual to answer his jokes. She was pale, and there was a hint of strain in her eyes.

“You’re not bothered about Ahchoogah’s imaginary terrors, are you?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Not that.”

He wondered what it was then, but did not like to ask directly. It suddenly struck him that she had been steadily losing tone since the first day on the trail.

Her next words showed the direction her thoughts were taking. “You said it was two hundred miles down the river. How long do you think it will take us to make it?”

“Three days and a bit, if my guess as to the distance is right. We have the current to help us, and now we don’t have to stop for the horses to graze.”

“They will be hard days to put in,” she said simply.

Stonor pondered for a long time on what she meant by this. Was she so consumed by impatience to arrive that the dragging hours were a torture to her? or was it simply the uncertainty of what awaited her, and a longing to have it over with? That she had been eager for the journey was clear, but it had not seemed like a joyful eagerness. He was aware that there was something here he did not understand. Women had unfathomable souls anyway.

As far as he was concerned he frankly dreaded the outcome of the journey. How was he to bear himself at the meeting of this divided couple? He could not avoid being a witness of it. He must hand her over with a smile, he supposed, and make a graceful get-away. But suppose he were prevented from leaving immediately. Or suppose, as was quite likely, that they wished to return with him! He ground his teeth at the thought of such an ordeal. Would he be able to carry it off? He must!

“What’s the matter?” Clare asked suddenly. She had been studying his face.

“Why did you ask?”

“You looked as if you had a sudden pain.”

“I had,” he said, with a rueful smile. “My knees. It’s so long since I paddled that they’re not limbered up yet.”

She appeared not altogether satisfied with this explanation.

This part of the river showed a succession of long smooth reaches with low banks of a uniform height bordered with picturesque ragged jack-pines, tall, thin, and sharply pointed. Here and there, where the composition seemed to require it, a perfect island was planted in the brown flood. At the foot of the pines along the edge of each bank grew rows of berry bushes as regularly as if set out by a gardener. Already the water was receding as a result of the summer drouth, but, as fast as it fell, the muddy beach left at the foot of each bank was mantled with the tender green of goose-grass, a diminutive cousin of the tropical bamboo. Mile after mile the character of the stream showed no variance. It was like a noble corridor through the pines.

At intervals during the day they met a few Kakisas, singly or in pairs, in their beautifully-made little birch-bark canoes. These individuals, when they came upon them suddenly, almost capsized in their astonishment at beholding pale-faces on their river. No doubt, in the tepees behind the willows, the coming of the whites had long been foretold as a portent of dreadful things.

They displayed their feelings according to their various natures. The first they met, a solitary youth, was frankly terrified. He hastened ashore, the water fairly cascading from his paddle, and, squatting behind the bushes, peered through at them like an animal. The next pair stood their ground, clinging to an overhanging willow too startled to escape perhaps where they stared with goggling eyes, and visibly trembled. It gave Stonor and Clare a queer sense of power thus to have their mere appearance create so great an excitement. Nothing could be got out of these two; they would not even answer questions from Mary in their own tongue.

The fourth Kakisa, however, an incredibly ragged and dirty old man with a dingy cotton fillet around his snaky locks, hailed them with wild shouts of laughter, paddled to meet them, and clung to the dug-out, fondly stroking Stonor’s sleeve. The sight of Clare caused him to go off into fresh shrieks of good-natured merriment. His name, he informed them, was Lookoovar, or so they understood it. He had a stomach-ache, he said, and wished for some of the white man’s wonderful stomach-warming medicine of which he had heard.

“It seems that our principal claim to fame up here is whisky,” said Stonor.

He gave the old man a pill. Lookoovar swallowed it eagerly, but looked disappointed at the absence of immediate results.

All these men were hunting their dinners. Close to the shore they paddled softly against the current, or drifted silently down, searching the bushes with their keen flat eyes for the least stir. Since everything had to come down to the river sooner or later to drink, they could have had no better point of vantage. Every man had a gun in his canoe, but ammunition is expensive on the Swan River, and for small fry, musk-rat, duck, fool-hen, or rabbit, they still used the prehistoric bow and arrow.

“The Swan River is like the Kakisas’ Main Street,” said Stonor. “All day they mosey up and down looking in the shop-windows for bargains in feathers and furs.”

They camped for the night on a cleared point occupied by the bare poles of several tepees. The Indians left these poles standing at all the best sites along the river, ready to use the next time they should spell that way. They frequently left their caches too, that is to say, spare gear, food and what-not, trustfully hanging from near-by branches in birch-bark containers. The Kakisas even tote water in bark pails.

Next day the character of the river changed. It now eddied around innumerable short bends right and left with an invariable regularity, each bend so like the last they lost all track of the distance they had come. Its course was as regularly crooked as a crimping-iron. On each bend it ate under the bank on the outside, and deposited a bar on the inside. On one side the pines toppled into the water as their footing was undermined, while poplars sprang up on the other side in the newly-made ground.

On the afternoon of this day they suddenly came upon the village of which they had been told. It fronted on a little lagoon behind one of the sand-bars. This was the village where Imbrie was said to have cured the Kakisas of measles. At present most of the inhabitants were pitching off up and down the river, and there were only half a dozen covered tepees in sight, but the bare poles of many others showed the normal extent of the village.

The usual furore of excitement was caused by their unheralded appearance around the bend. For a moment the Indians completely lost their heads, and there was a mad scurry for the tepees. Some mothers dragged their screaming offspring into the bush for better shelter. Only one or two of the bravest among the men dared show themselves. But with true savage volatility they recovered from their panic as suddenly as they had been seized. One by one they stole to the edge of the bank, where they stood staring down at the travellers, with their shoe-button eyes empty of all human expression.

Stonor had no intention of landing here. He waited with the nose of the Serpent resting in the mud until the excitement died down. Then, through Mary, he requested speech with the head man.

A bent old man tottered down the bank with the aid of a staff. He wore a dirty blanket capote and a bicycle cap! He faced them, his head wagging with incipient palsy, and his dim eyes looking out bleared, indifferent, and jaded. Sparse grey hairs decorated his chin. It was a picture of age without reverence.

“How dreadful to grow old in a tepee!” murmured Clare.

The old man was accompanied by a comely youth with bold eyes, his grandson, according to Mary. The elder’s name was Ahcunazie, the boy’s Ahteeah.

Stonor, in the name of the Great White Father, harangued the chief in a style similar to that he had used with Ahchoogah. Ahcunazie appeared dazed and incapable of replying, so Stonor said:

“Talk with your people and find out what all desire. I will return in a week for your answer.”

When this was translated the young man spoke up sharply. Mary said: “Ahteeah say, What for you want go down the river?”

Stonor said: “To see the white man,” and watched close to see how they would take it.

The scene in the other village was almost exactly repeated. Ahteeah brought up all the reasons he could think of that would be likely to dissuade Stonor. Other men, hearing what was going forward, came down to support the boy. Stonor’s boat was rotten, they pointed out, and the waves in the rapids ran as high as a man. With vivid gestures they illustrated what would happen to the dug-out in the rapids. If he escaped the rapids he would surely be carried over the Falls; and if he wasn’t, how did he expect to get back up the rapids? And so on.

Old Ahcunazie stood through it all uncomprehending and indifferent. He was too old even to betray any interest in the phenomenon of the white woman.

One thing new the whites marked: “White Medicine Man don’ like white men. He say if white men come he goin’ away.” This suggested a possible reason for the Indian’s opposition.

Stonor still remaining unmoved, Ahteeah brought out as a clincher: “White Medicine Man not home now.”

Stonor and Clare looked at each other startled. This would be a calamity after having travelled all that way. “Where is he?” Stonor demanded.

The young Indian, delighted at his apparent success, answered glibly: “He say he goin’ down to Great Buffalo Lake this summer.”

An instant’s reflection satisfied Stonor that if this were true it would have been brought out first instead of last. “Oh, well, since we’ve come as far as this we’ll go the rest of the way to make sure,” he said calmly.

Ahteeah looked disappointed. They pushed off. The Indians watched them go in sullen silence.

“Certainly we are not popular in this neighbourhood,” said Stonor lightly. “One can’t get rid of the feeling that their minds have been poisoned against us. Mary, can’t you tell me why they give me such black looks?”

She shook her head. “I think there is something,” she said. “But they not tell me because I with you.”

“Maybe it has something to do with me?” said Clare.

“How could that be? They never heard of you.”

“I think it is Stonor,” said Mary.

Clare was harder to rouse out of herself to-day. Stonor did his best not to show that he perceived anything amiss, and strove to cheer her with chaff and foolishness likewise to keep his own heart up, but not altogether with success.

On one occasion Clare sought to reassure him by saying, a propos of nothing that had gone before: “The worst of having an imagination is, that when you have anything to go through with, it keeps presenting the most horrible alternatives in advance until you are almost incapable of facing the thing. And after all it is never so bad as your imagination pictures.”

“I understand that,” said Stonor, “though I don’t suppose anybody would accuse me of being imaginative.”

“‘Something to go through with!’” he thought. “‘Horrible alternatives!’ ‘Never so bad as your imagination pictures!’ What strange phrases for a woman to use who is going to rejoin her husband!”

When they embarked after the second spell Clare asked if she might sit facing forward in the dug-out, so she could see better where they were going. But Stonor guessed this was merely an excuse to escape from having his solicitous eyes on her face.

Next morning they overtook the last Kakisa that they were to see on the way down. He was drifting along close to the shore, and behind him in his canoe sat his little boy as still as a mouse, receiving his education in hunter’s lore. This man was a more intelligent specimen than they had met hitherto. He was a comely little fellow with an extraordinary head of hair cut a la Buster Brown, and his name, he said, was Etzooah. Stonor remembered having heard of him and his hair as far away as Fort Enterprise. His manners were good. While naturally astonished at their appearance, he did not on that account lose his self-possession. They conversed politely while drifting down side by side.

Etzooah, in sharp contrast to all the other Kakisas, appeared to see nothing out of the way in their wish to visit the White Medicine Man, nor did he try to dissuade them.

“How far is it to the Great Falls?” asked Stonor.

“One sleep.”

“Are the rapids too bad for a boat?”

“Rapids bad, but not too bad. I go down in my bark-canoe, I guess you go all right in dug-out. Long tam ago my fat’er tell me all the Kakisa people go to the Big Falls ev’ry year at the time when the berries ripe. By the Big Falls they meet the people from Great Buffalo Lake and make big talk there and make dance to do honour to the Old Man under the falls. And this people trade leather for fur with the people from Great Buffalo Lake. But now this people is scare to go there. But I am not scare. I go there. Three times I go there. Each time I leave a little present of tobacco for the Old Man so he know my heart is good towards him. I guess Old Man like a brave man better than a woman. No harm come to me since I go. My wife, my children got plenty to eat; I catch good fur. Bam-bye I take my boy there too. Some men say I crazy for that, but I say no. It is a fine sight. It make a man’s heart big to see that sight.”

This was a man after Stonor’s own heart. “Tell him those are good words,” he said heartily.

When they asked him about the White Man who lived beside the falls, Etzooah’s eyes sparkled. “He say he my friend, and I proud. Since he say that I think more of myself. I walk straight. I am not afraid. He is good. He make the sick well. He give the people good talk. He tell how to live clean and all, so there is no more sickness. He moch like children. He good to my boy. Give him little face that say ‘Ticky-ticky’ and follow the sun.”

Etzooah issued a command to his small son, and the boy shyly exhibited a large cheap nickel watch.

“No other Kakisa man or boy got that,” said the parent proudly.

“Is it true that this white man hates other white men?” asked Stonor.

Etzooah made an emphatic negative. “He got no hate. He say red man white man all the same man.”

“Then he’ll be glad to see us?”

“I think he glad. Got good heart to all.”

“Is he at home now?”

“He is at home. I see him go down the river three sleeps ago.”

Those in the dug-out exchanged looks of astonishment. “Ask him if he is sure?” said Stonor.

Etzooah persisted in his statement. “I not speak him for cause I hiding in bush watchin’ bear. And he is across the river. But I see good. See white face. I know him because he not paddle like Kakisa one side other side; him paddle all time same side and turn the paddle so to make go straight.”

“Where had he been?”

“Up to Horse Track, I guess.”

Horse Track, of course, was the trail from the river to Fort Enterprise. The village at the end of the trail received the same designation. If the tale of this visit was true it might have something to do with the hostility they had met with above.

“But we have just come from the Horse Track,” said Stonor, to feel the man out. “Nobody told us he had been there.”

Etzooah shrugged. “Maybe they scare. Not know what to say to white man.”

But Stonor thought, if anything, they had known too well what to say. “How long had he been up there?” he asked.

“I not know. I not know him gone up river till see him come back.”

“Maybe he only went a little way up.”

Etzooah shook his head vigorously. “His canoe was loaded heavy.”

Etzooah accompanied them to the point where the current began to increase its pace preparatory to the first rapid.

“This the end my hunting-ground,” he said. “Too much work to come back up the rapids.” He saluted them courteously, and caused the little boy to do likewise. His parting remark was: “Tell the White Medicine Man Etzooah never forget he call him friend.”

“Well, we’ve found one gentleman among the Kakisas,” Stonor said to Clare, as they paddled on.

The first rapid was no great affair. There was plenty of water, and they were carried racing smoothly down between low rocky banks. Stonor named the place the Grumbler from the deep throaty sound it gave forth.

In quiet water below they discussed what they had heard.

“It gets thicker and thicker,” said Stonor. “It seems to me that Imbrie’s having been at the Horse Track lately must have had something to do with the chilly reception we received.”

“Why should it?” said Clare. “He has nothing to fear from the coming of anybody.”

“Then why did they say nothing about his visit?”

She shook her head. “You know I cannot fathom these people.”

“Neither can I, for that matter. But it does seem as if he must have told them not to tell anybody they had seen him.”

“It is not like him.”

“Ahteeah said Imbrie hated white men; Etzooah said his heart was kind to all men: which is the truer description?”

“Etzooah’s,” she said instantly. “He has a simple, kind heart. He lives up to the rule ‘Love thy neighbour’ better than any man I ever knew.”

“Well, we’ll know to-morrow,” said Stonor, making haste to drop the disconcerting subject. Privately he asked himself: “Why, if Imbrie is such a good man, does she seem to dread meeting him?” There was no answer forthcoming.

The rapids became progressively wilder and rougher as they went on down, and Stonor was not without anxiety as to the coming back. Sometimes they came on white water unexpectedly around a bend, but the river was not so crooked now, and more often far ahead they saw the white rabbits dancing in the sunshine, causing their breasts to constrict with a foretaste of fear. As the current bore them inexorably closer, and they picked out the rocks and the great white combers awaiting them, there was always a moment when they longed to turn aside from their fate. But once having plunged into the welter, fear vanished, and a great exhilaration took its place. They shouted madly to each other even stolid Mary, and were sorry when they came to the bottom. Between rapids the smooth stretches seemed insufferably tedious to pass.

Stonor’s endeavour was to steer a middle course between the great billows in the middle of the channel, which he feared might swamp the Serpent or break her in half, and the rocks at each side which would have smashed her to pieces. Luckily he had had a couple of days in which to learn the vagaries of his craft. In descending a swift current one has to bear in mind that any boat begins to answer her helm some yards ahead of the spot where the impulse is applied.

As the day wore on he bethought himself that “one sleep” was an elastic term of distance, and in order to avoid the possibility of being carried over the falls he adopted the rule of landing at the head of each rapid, and walking down the shore to pick his channel, and to make sure that there was smooth water below. They had been told that there was no rapid immediately above the falls, that the water slipped over without giving warning, but Stonor dismissed this into the limbo of red-skin romancing. He did not believe it possible for a river to go over a fall without some preliminary disturbance.

As it happened, dusk descended on them in the middle of a smooth reach, and they made camp for the last time on the descent, pitching the three tents under the pines in the form of a little square open on the river side. Clare was very silent during the meal, and Stonor’s gaiety sounded hollow in his own ears. They turned in immediately after eating.

Stonor awoke in the middle of the night without being able to tell what had awakened him. He had a sense that something was wrong. It was a breathless cool night. Under the pines it was very dark, but outside of their shadow the river gleamed wanly. Such sounds as he heard, the murmur of a far-off rapid, and a whisper in the topmost boughs of the pines, conveyed a suggestion of empty immeasurable distances. The fire had burned down to its last embers.

Suddenly he became aware of what was the matter; Clare was weeping. It was the merest hint of a sound, softer than falling leaves, just a catch of the breath that escaped her now and then. Stonor lay listening with bated breath, as if terrified of losing that which tore his heartstrings to hear. He was afflicted with a ghastly sense of impotence. He had no right to intrude on her grief. Yet how could he lie supine when she was in trouble, and make believe not to hear? He could not lie still. He got up, taking no care to be quiet, and built up the fire. She could not know, of course, that he had heard that broken breath. Perhaps she would speak to him. Or, if she could not speak, perhaps she would take comfort from the mere fact of his waking presence outside.

He heard no further sound from her tent.

After a while, because it was impossible for him not to say it, he softly asked: “Are you asleep?”

There was no answer.

He sat down by the fire listening and brooding humming a little tune meanwhile to assure her of the blitheness of his spirits.

By and by a small voice issued from under her tent: “Please go back to bed,” and he knew at once that she saw through his poor shift to deceive her.

“Honest, I don’t feel like sleeping,” he said cheerfully.

“Did I wake you?”

“No,” he lied. “Were you up?”

“You were worrying about me,” she said.

“Nothing to speak of. I thought perhaps the silence and the solitude had got on your nerves a little. It’s that kind of a night.”

“I don’t mind it,” she said; “with you near and Mary,” she quickly added. “Please go back to bed.”

He crept to her tent. It was purely an involuntary act. He was on his knees, but he did not think of that. “Ah, Clare, if I could only take your trouble from you!” he murmured.

“Hush!” she whispered. “Put me and my troubles out of your head. It is nothing. It is like the rapids; one loses one’s nerve when they loom up ahead. I shall be all right when I am in them.”

“Clare, let me sit here on the ground beside you not touching you.”

“No please! Go back to your tent. It will be easier for me.”

In the morning they arose heavily, and set about the business of breakfasting and breaking camp with little speech. Indeed, there was nothing to say. Neither Stonor nor Clare could make believe now to be otherwise than full of dread of what the day had in store. Embarking, Clare took a paddle too, and all three laboured doggedly, careless alike of rough water and smooth.

In the middle of the day they heard, for some minutes before the place itself hove in view, the roar of a rapid greater than any they had passed.

“This will be something!” said Stonor.

But as they swept around the bend above they never saw the rapid, for among the trees on the bank at the beginning of the swift water there stood a little new log shack. That sight struck them like a blow. There was no one visible outside the shack, but the door stood open.