Ruth was startled. She had supposed herself to be travelling deep into
the wilderness. She had yet to learn that in the wilderness, where men
traffic in little else, they exchange gossip with incredible energy--
talk it, in fact, all the time. In those early colonial days the
settlers overleapt and left behind them leagues of primeval forest, to
all appearance inviolate. But the solitude was no longer virgin. Where
foot of man had once parted the undergrowth the very breath of the wind
followed and threaded its way after him, bearing messages to and fro.

"I'm no speirin'," said the oldster cautiously. "But though our lads
have never been so far, there's talk of a braw house buildin'."

Here, somewhat hastily, Sir Oliver took him aside, and they spent twenty
minutes or so in converse together. Ruth waited.

He came back and selected young Adam, with a cousin of his--a taciturn
youth, by name Jesse, son of Andrew--to be their boatman. Five or six
of the young men were evidently eager to be chosen; but none disputed
his choice. Rome, which reaches everywhere, reigned in the forest here;
its old law of family unquestioned and absolute. The two youths swung
off to pack and provision the canoe. An hour later they reported that
all was ready; and by three in the afternoon the voyagers were on their
way up-stream.

The voyage lasted four days and was seldom laborious; for the river ran
in long loops through the table-land, and with an easy current.
But here and there shallow runs of rock made stairways for it from one
level to another, and each of these miniature rapids compelled a
portage; so that towards the end of the second day the young men had
each a red shoulder spot chafed by the canoe's weight.

They camped by night close beside the murmuring water, ate their supper
beside a fire of boughs, slept on piled leaves beneath a tent of canvas
stretched over a long ridge-pole. The two young men had a separate and
similar tent.

For two days the forest hemmed them in so closely that although frost
had half-stripped the deciduous trees, the eye found few vistas save
along the river ahead. On either hand was drawn a continuous curtain of
mossed stems and boughs overlapping and interlacing their delicate
twigs. Scarcely a bird sang within the curtain; scarcely a woodland
sound broke in upon the monotonous plash of the paddles. Alder, birch,
maple, pine, spruce, and hemlock--the woods were a lifeless tapes