bank in spite of
his best efforts with the paddle. Then a favoring current caught it and
swept it out toward the center of the stream.

It was much too big and clumsy for him to control without the stream's
help, though he labored doggedly with his paddle. Now he was broadside
to the current, now he was being spun round and round, but always he
was carried farther and farther from the spot where he had embarked. He
passed about a bend; and a hundred yards beyond, about a second bend;
then the stream opened up straight before him a half-mile of smooth
running water. Far down it, at the point where the trees met in the
unbroken line of the forest and the water seemed to vanish mysteriously,
he could distinguish a black moving object; some ark or raft, doubtless.

In the smoother water of the long reach, Hannibal began to make head
against the flood. The farther shore became the nearer, and finally he
drove the bow of his canoe up on a bit of shelving bank, and seizing
his pack and rifle, sprang ashore. Panting and exhausted, he paused just
long enough to push the canoe out into the stream again, and then, with
his rifle and pack in his hands, turned his small tear-stained face
toward the wooded slope beyond. As he toiled up it in the wide silence
of the dawn, a mournful wind burst out of the north, filling the air
about him with withered leaves and the dead branches of trees.

CHAPTER VIII. ON THE RIVER

Betty stood under a dripping umbrella in the midst of a drenching
downpour, her boxes and trunks forming a neat pyramid of respectable
size beside her. She was somewhat perturbed in spirit, since they
contained much elaborate finery all in the very latest eastern fashion,
spoils that were the fruit of a heated correspondence with Tom, who
hadn't seemed at all alive to the fact that Betty was nearly eighteen
and in her own right a young woman of property. A tarpaulin had been
thrown over the heap, and with one eye on it and the other on the
stretch of yellow canal up which they were bringing the fast packet
Pioneer, she was waiting impatiently to see her belongings transferred
to a place of safety.

Just arrived by the four-horse coach that plyed regularly between
Washington and Georgetown, she had found the long board platform beside
the canal crowded with her fellow passengers, their number augmented
by those who delight to share vicariously in travel and to whom the
departure of a stage or boat was a matter