IM," Jim would say, pointing to a
distant swan. Or Li Tee, hunting a striped water snake from the reeds,
would utter stolidly, "Melikan boy no likee snake." Yet the next two
days brought some trouble and physical discomfort to them. Bob
had consumed, or wasted, all their provisions--and, still more
unfortunately, his righteous visit, his gun, and his superabundant
animal spirits had frightened away the game, which their habitual quiet
and taciturnity had beguiled into trustfulness. They were half starved,
but they did not blame him. It would come all right when he returned.
They counted the days, Jim with secret notches on the long pole, Li Tee
with a string of copper "cash" he always kept with him. The eventful
day came at last,--a warm autumn day, patched with inland fog like blue
smoke and smooth, tranquil, open surfaces of wood and sea; but to their
waiting, confident eyes the boy came not out of either. They kept a
stolid silence all that day until night fell, when Jim said, "Mebbe
Boston boy go dead." Li Tee nodded. It did not seem possible to these
two heathens that anything else could prevent the Christian child from
keeping his word.

After that, by the aid of the canoe, they went much on the marsh,
hunting apart, but often meeting on the trail which Bob had taken, with
grunts of mutual surprise. These suppressed feelings, never made known
by word or gesture, at last must have found vicarious outlet in the
taciturn dog, who so far forgot his usual discretion as to once or twice
seat himself on the water's edge and indulge in a fit of howling. It had
been a custom of Jim's on certain days to retire to some secluded place,
where, folded in his blanket, with his back against a tree, he remained
motionless for hours. In the settlement this had been usually referred
to the after effects of drink, known as the "horrors," but Jim had
explained it by saying it was "when his heart was bad." And now it
seemed, by these gloomy abstractions, that "his heart was bad" very
often. And then the long withheld rains came one night on the wings of
a fierce southwester, beating down their frail lodge and scattering
it abroad, quenching their camp-fire, and rolling up the bay until it
invaded their reedy island and hissed in their ears. It drove the game
from Jim's gun; it tore the net and scattered the bait of Li Tee, the
fisherman. Cold and half starved in heart and body, but more dogged and
silent than ever, they crept out in th