I want
you to take _off_ your wet things and tuck yourself into bed. Will you,
Gray Goose?"

"I'm not tired, but if you think it is best--" Her hand touched his arm.

"It is best," he said, and for a moment he bent over her until his lips
touched her hair.

Then he seized a pail, and went out into the rain.

CHAPTER XX

It was that hour when, with clear skies, the gray northern dawn would
have been breaking faintly over the eastern forests. Kent found the
darkness more fog-like; about him was a grayer, ghostlier sort of
gloom. But he could not see the water under his feet. Nor could he see
the rail of the scow, or the river. From the stern, ten feet from the
cabin door, the cabin itself was swallowed up and invisible.

With the steady, swinging motion of the riverman he began bailing. So
regular became his movements that they ran in a sort of rhythmic
accompaniment to his thoughts. The monotonous _splash, splash, splash_ of
the outflung pails of water assumed, after a few minutes, the character
of a mechanical thing. He could smell the nearness of the shore. Even
in the rain the tang of cedar and balsam came to him faintly.

But it was the river that impressed itself most upon his senses. It
seemed to him, as the minutes passed, like a living thing. He could
hear it gurgling and playing under the end of the scow. And with that
sound there was another and more indescribable thing, the tremble of
it, the pulse of it, the thrill of it in the impenetrable gloom, the
life of it as it swept on in a slow and mighty flood between its
wilderness walls. Kent had always said, "You can hear the river's heart
beat--if you know how to listen for it." And he heard it now. He felt
it. The rain could not beat it out, nor could the splash of the water
he was throwing overboard drown it, and the darkness could not hide it
from the vision that was burning like a living coal within him. Always
it was the river that had given him consolation in times of loneliness.
For him it had grown into a thing with a soul, a thing that personified
hope, courage, comradeship, everything that was big and great in final
achievement. And tonight--for he still thought of the darkness as
night--the soul of it seemed whispering to him a sort of paean.

He could not lose. That was the thought that filled him. Never had his
pulse beat with greater assurance, never had a more positive sense of
the inevitable possessed him. It was inconceivable,