h him, she
counted her stitches, her fingers worked, and she talked to him as she
might have talked to a friend of St. Pierre's. She told him how St.
Pierre had made the barge, the largest that had ever been on the river,
and that he had built it entirely of dry cedar, so that it floated like
a feather wherever there was water enough to run a York boat. She told
him how St. Pierre had brought the piano down from Edmonton, and how he
had saved it from pitching in the river by carrying the full weight of
it on his shoulders when they met with an accident in running through a
dangerous rapids bringing it down. St. Pierre was a very strong man,
she said, a note of pride in her voice. And then she added,

"Sometimes, when he picks me up in his arms, I feel that he is going to
squeeze the life out of me!"

Her words were like a sharp thrust into his heart. For an instant they
painted a vision for him, a picture of that slim and adorable creature
crushed close in the great arms of St. Pierre, so close that she could
not breathe. In that mad moment of his hurt it was almost a living,
breathing reality for him there on the golden fore-deck of the scow. He
turned his face toward the far shore, where the wilderness seemed to
reach off into eternity. What a glory it was--the green seas of spruce
and cedar and balsam, the ridges of poplar and birch rising like
silvery spume above the darker billows, and afar off, mellowed in the
sun-mists, the guardian crests of Trout Mountains sentineling the
country beyond! Into that mystery-land on the farther side of the
Wabiskaw waterways Carrigan would have loved to set his foot four days
ago. It was that mystery of the unpeopled places that he most desired,
their silence, the comradeship of spaces untrod by the feet of man. And
now, what a fool he was! Through vast distances the forests he loved
seemed to whisper it to him, and ahead of him the river seemed to look
back, nodding over its shoulder, beckoning to him, telling him the word
of the forests was true. It streamed on lazily, half a mile wide, as if
resting for the splashing and roaring rush it would make among the
rocks of the next rapids, and in its indolence it sang the low and
everlasting song of deep and slowly passing water. In that song David
heard the same whisper, that he was a fool! And the lure of the
wilderness shores crept in on him and gripped him as of old. He looked
at the rowers in the two York boats, and then his eye