iberately
choose."

"How was that?"

"Get your notebook!" she jeered. "I thought if he was going to rely on
the specious joys of liquor I would, and tried it. It was a blizzard day
last winter. He had gone over to see the widow, and there was a bottle
of rum in the cupboard. I took some hot milk, nutmeg, sugar, and rum.
I've never felt so happy in my life, except----"

"With what exception?" he asked.

"Yesterday," she answered, laughing, "and last night and to-day! You
see, I'm free now. I say and do what I please. I don't care any more.
I'm perfectly brazen. I don't love you, but I like you very much. You're
good company. I hope I am, too----"

"You are--splendid!" he cried, almost involuntarily, and she shivered.

"Let's go walking again, will you?" she said. "I want to get out in the
wind; I want to have the sky overhead, a sandbar under my feet, and all
outdoors at my command. You don't mind, you'd like to go?"

"To the earth's end!" he replied, recklessly, and her gay laugh showed
how well he had pleased her mood.

They kept close up to the north side of the bar because down the wind
the sand was lifting and rolling up in yellow clouds. They went to
Winchester Chute, and followed its winding course through the wood
patch. There was a slough of green water, with a flock of ducks which
left precipitately on their approach. They returned down to the sandbar,
and pressed their way through the thick clump of small willows into the
switch willows and along the edge of the unbroken desert of sand. They
could see the very surface of the bar rolling along before the wind, and
as they walked along they found their feet submerged in the blast.

But when they arrived at the boat night was near at hand, and the
enveloping cold became more biting and the gloom more depressing.

Just when they had eaten their supper together, and had seated
themselves before the fire, and when the whirl and whistle of the wind
was heard in the mad music of a river storm, a motorboat with its
cut-out open ploughed up the river through the dead eddy and stopped to
hail.

Jim Talum, a fisherman whose line of hoop nets filled the reach of
Island No. 9 for eight or ten miles, was on his way to his tent which he
had pitched at the head of Winchester Chute.

He tramped aboard, and welcomed a seat by the fire.

"'Lowed I'd drap in a minute," he declared. "Powerful lonesome up on the
chute where I got my tent. Be'n runnin' my traps down t