On the first day of the journey Ralph, according to the immemorial instinct of travellers, started a diary, and illustrated it with rough day to day maps. He wrote it up by the campfire during the long twilights, or while they basked in the sun at the noon spell. Charley never noticed it, but whenever the little black book was produced Nahnya looked curious and oddly annoyed. But she could not very well order Ralph to give it up.

On the afternoon of the day following Ralph's outbreak and their midnight reconciliation her curiosity finally found vent in speech. Passing down the largest of the lakes a strong head wind had blown up, and after struggling against it for a couple of hours, and thoroughly wetting themselves and their baggage without making much progress, Nahnya had ordered a landing. They now lay in rustling grass on a point of land blown upon by the strong fresh wind, and deliciously warmed by the sun. Charley had fallen asleep. When Ralph brought out the diary Nahnya said:

"What do you write in your little book?"

"Just what we see every day," said Ralph.

Nahnya frowned a little. "You promise me you never tell what you see," she said.

"I never will," said Ralph quickly. "No one but myself shall ever read this."

"Maybe some one find it," said Nahnya. "What good is your promise then?"

"It is written in shorthand," he said, exhibiting it. "No one can read it but me."

She was mollified. "It is like the Cree writing that the missionaries teach," she said. "Read it to me," she added with a kind of shy boldness.

Ralph was nothing loath. It was his matter-of-fact self that guided the pencil. "Estimate it seventy-five miles from Hat Lake to Beaver Lake," he began. "Probably less than half that in a straight line, because the river is as crooked as a corkscrew. Called the second lake Beaver Lake because of the hills to the west; a medium size hill for the head, a big hill for the body, and a long, low hill for the tail."

"That is a good name," interrupted Nahnya.

"Couldn't see the whole of Beaver Lake at once, but you head straight down the lake from point to point; then about twenty miles more of river to Breeches Lake. It's shaped like a pair of breeches. As you start down it a long, thin point faces you almost dividing it in two. Nothing doing in the left leg; the right leg goes through. The water of all the lakes is amber coloured, but black as onyx when you look straight down. It's great to see the shores without a tree chopped down, or a house anywhere to spoil the natural effect.

"The river is full of mother wild ducks and their newly hatched families. Comical little puff-balls. Hell to pay when we come along. Old Mis' Duck she plays every trick she knows to lead us away from the family, and the babies they just keep on diving till they are too tired to wiggle their tails any more."

Nahnya laughed.

"Can't tell which way you're going in the river, but all the lakes stretch north and south, so I figure we're travelling due north. Charley bent a piece of tin like a trolling spoon and caught a thumping salmon trout. They call it sapi. Best fish I ever tasted. I call the fourth lake Sword Lake; it's long and narrow and straight, with a bend at the top like a handle. There are hills both sides all the way—bluest I ever saw. We are camped on the point at the beginning of the bend and I can't see what's around it."

"This McIlwraith Lake," said Nahnya.

Ralph made the entry.

"Is that all?" she asked.

"That's all," he said.

"Nothing about me?" she said, archly smiling and wistful, affecting a great surprise.

Ralph, avoiding her eye, shook his head. It was the truth. He could not bare his heart concerning Nahnya, even to the discreet little book.

"Why do you write it?" Nahnya asked.

"Oh, when you take a bully trip you like to have a record of it—to read when you are old, I suppose."

"When you are old I think you will laugh at this," Nahnya said, looking away.

"Think so?" said Ralph.

Half-measures were impossible to Nahnya. When she was on her guard a wall was no stonier; when she gave her confidence she gave it all. To-day her eyes were as open and affectionate as a child's; there was gratitude in their wistful depths, a hint of humility. This in the same girl who had beaten Ralph about the head only the day before!

Ralph, without altogether understanding the change in her, was touched and thrilled by her look. Alas! for his good resolutions. It had been easy the night before under stress of emotion to swear he would never touch her, never alarm her by his passion. He dimly understood that it was her reliance on his promise that made her so free with him to-day, and yet—his arms ached for her a hundred times more than before, and when in the business about camp they accidentally touched each other, the same old unregenerate madness made his brain reel.

Tossed between two thoughts, he was happy and he was miserable. "She does care! She couldn't look at me like that if she didn't! No! She only looks like that because she feels safe from my love-making!"

This was the undercurrent; on the surface all was serene. The combination of strong, cool wind and hot sunshine was delicious. Nahnya was soling the same pair of moccasins, while Ralph, more tractable to-day, shaped and smoothed the handle of his paddle with a knife. Nahnya developed a faculty for asking questions.

"How long you live in Fort Edward, Ralph?"

The initial "R" was difficult for her tongue to encompass. She delicately aspirated his name thus, "Hoo-ralph." He thought the sound of it enchanting.

"Six weeks."

"You like it there?"

"Dull as ditch-water."

"They tell me plenty fun at Fort Edward."

"Not my kind of fun."

"Plenty girls."

"Girls? Lord! Frights!"

"I suppose you like outside fun better, waltz-dancing and high-toned girls and all."

"Society, you mean? I never was much for that."

"Where did you live before you came to Fort Edward?"

"New York, last, working in a hospital."

"I know hospitals. They have good times. The doctors go out with the nurses."

"Not this doctor. Nurses are too—too iodoformy."

"What's that, Ralph?"

"Oh, too professional."

"Some nurses are sweet."

"I never had any luck that way."

"What you do when you go out in New York?"

"Oh, hang round with the fellows, and go to shows. I never had any money."

Nahnya, very intent on her sewing: "Did you know any of the actresses?"

"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 he! 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."

"Ralph never guessed he was being searched through and through by a woman's loving, jealous curiosity"
"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!

After a while she said: "Will you promise never to come back?"

"No!" cried Ralph, very red in the face. "I am a free agent!"

"Then I got to tie your eyes," she said.

"I won't submit to it!" cried Ralph hotly.

She shrugged and turned away. She gave an order to the sulky Charley, and between them they unloaded the dugout. Though it was scarcely four in the afternoon, the three little tents were set up in a row on top of the bank, and every preparation made for spending the night.

The mosquitoes soon drove them in, each under his own shelter, where they lay for the rest of the afternoon, sleeping, sulking, or sorrowing as the case was. They issued out for a hasty, silent supper and turned in again. There was a gorgeous, troubled sunset above the pines across the river, and afterward the evening star came out like a lighthouse in a canary sea with dark blue islands. The hard, swift face of the river mellowed in the fading light, and gleamed with the soft lustre of old, blue stained glass. None of those in the little tents gave any heed.

In the middle of the night Ralph was rudely awakened by the descent of two heavy knees between his shoulders. While he still struggled with the mists of sleep, his wrists were secured behind him. He put up the best fight he could, but his ankles were soon tied, too. Then it was easy to bandage his eyes.

Harder to bear than the indignity of bondage was the pain of betrayal that stabbed him.

"Is this your friendship?" he cried.

There was no answer out of the dark.