stronger, by pressing on and onward he could escape.
These were scarcely the thoughts with which a man should set out to
meet his bride. Desires to meet and avoid her alternated even now,
when with each fresh thrust of the paddle he approached her nearer
presence. Yet, even to his way of thinking, there was something epic
in the situation--that this girl of an alien tradition and a savage
race, with her copper skin, and blue-black hair, and timid eyes,
should be threading her passage up her native river, through the early
summer, toward her western lover who was hastening down the self-same
primeval highroad to meet her. Oh, he would be very happy with Peggy!
Thus imagining himself on through the labyrinth of passionate fancy,
he floated down stream, shrouded in the morning mist. He had to go
slowly, for he could not see far ahead, and travel by water was still
treacherous by reason of belated floes of ice. Over to the eastward
the sun winked down on him with a dissipated bloodshot eye, knowingly,
with the cruel misanthropic humour of a tired man of the world who,
regarding idealism as a jest, had guessed at the purpose of his errand
and was eager to declare his own shrewd cleverness.

And if the sun is a cynic, who can blame him? He alone of created
things has an intimate knowledge of all live things' love affairs,
from when Eve shook back her hair and lifted up her lips, to the last
girl kissed in Japan. The canoe drifting out of a scarf of mist
brought Granger in sight of the bend, where Strangeways had been
drowned. He plunged his paddle deeper in the water, thrusting it
forward to stay the progress of the prow, and glanced from side to
side, then straight ahead. He had caught the smell of burning. On the
northern side of the bend, curling above the trees, he could detect
the rise of smoke. Someone had lit a fire and was camping there. But
who? Was it Beorn and Peggy? No, they would not camp so near their
destination; they would have pushed on to the store for rest. Nor
could it be men from the Crooked Creek coming up to God's Voice; the
season was as yet too early for them to be expected. Then, was it
Spurling?

Paddling out into the middle stream, he stole beneath the farther
bank, and, rounding the bend, came in sight of two men, the one seated
upright before the fire cooking his bannocks, the other stretched out
twenty paces distant at the edge of the underbrush, completely covered
with a robe, motionless as