ith the dishes as well!"

She put on a jacket, pinned on a cap, and together, in merry mood, they
romped up the sandbar. It was all sand; there was not a log of timber,
not a drift barrel, not a stick of wood anywhere as far as they could
see. But as they walked along every foot of the sandbar was different,
wind-rifts, covering long, water-shaped reefs; or rising knolls, like
hills, and long depressions which held shadows darker by far than the
gloom of the night. They walked along, sometimes yards apart, sometimes
side by side. They forgot Ruskin and Carlyle--they remembered Thoreau's
"Cape Cod" and talked of the musical sands which they could hear now
under their own feet. In the silence they heard river voices; murmurings
and tones and rhythms and harmonies; and Terabon, who had accumulated a
vast store of information from the shanty-boaters, told her some of the
simple superstitions with which the river people beguile themselves and
add to the interest and difficulties of their lives.

"An old river man can look at the river and tell when a headrise is
coming," he told her. "He knows by the looks of the water when the river
is due to fall again. When he dreams, he says he knows what is going to
happen, and where to find buried treasure, and if there is going to be
an earthquake or a bad storm."

"They get queer living alone!" she said, thoughtfully. "Lots of them
used to stop in at our slough on Kaw River. I was afraid of them!"

"You afraid of anything!" he exclaimed. "Of any one!"

"Oh, that was a long time ago--ages ago!" She laughed, and then gave
voice to that most tragic riverside thought. "But now--nothing at all
matters now!"

She said it with an intonation which was almost relief and laughing,
that Terabon, whose mind had grappled for years with one of Ruskin's
most touching phrases, understood how it could be that the heart of a
human being could become so used to sorrows that no misery could bring
tears.

He knew in that very moment, as by revelation, that he had caught from
her lips one of the bitterest phrases which the human mind is capable of
forming. He was glad of the favour which fate had bestowed upon him, and
he thrilled, while he regretted, that in that hour he could not forget
that he was a seeker of facts, a gatherer of information.

To match her mood was beyond his own power. By a simple statement of
fact she had given herself a place in his thought comparable to--he went
at making