remove
from the soil, she was not afraid of the soil; she could return to it
gleefully and naturally.

So he mused till the boat drove in, ice-rimed and battered, against the
edge of the rim-ice. The one white man aboard sprang: out, painter in
hand, to slow it down and work into the channel. But the rim-ice was
formed of the night, and the front of it shelved off with him into the
current. The nose of the boat sheered out under the pressure of a
heavy cake, so that he came up at the stern. The woman's arm flashed
over the side to his collar, and at the same instant, sharp and
authoritative, her voice rang out to the Indian oarsmen to back water.
Still holding the man's head above water, she threw her body against
the sweep and guided the boat stern-foremost into the opening. A few
more strokes and it grounded at the foot of the bank. She passed the
collar of the chattering man to Dave Harney, who dragged him out and
started him off on the trail of the mail-carriers.

Frona stood up, her cheeks glowing from the quick work. Jacob Welse
hesitated. Though he stood within reach of the gunwale, a gulf of
three years was between. The womanhood of twenty, added unto the girl
of seventeen, made a sum more prodigious than he had imagined. He did
not know whether to bear-hug the radiant young creature or to take her
hand and help her ashore. But there was no apparent hitch, for she
leaped beside him and was into his arms. Those above looked away to a
man till the two came up the bank hand in hand.

"Gentlemen, my daughter." There was a great pride in his face.

Frona embraced them all with a comrade smile, and each man felt that
for an instant her eyes had looked straight into his.

CHAPTER VII

That Vance Corliss wanted to see more of the girl he had divided
blankets with, goes with the saying. He had not been wise enough to
lug a camera into the country, but none the less, by a yet subtler
process, a sun-picture had been recorded somewhere on his cerebral
tissues. In the flash of an instant it had been done. A wave message
of light and color, a molecular agitation and integration, a certain
minute though definite corrugation in a brain recess,--and there it
was, a picture complete! The blazing sunlight on the beetling black; a
slender gray form, radiant, starting forward to the vision from the
marge where light and darkness met; a fresh young morning smile
wreathed in a flame of burning gold.

I