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 thinkin............