lity and take you for my squaw, the same as your father took
Alluna. I guess you're no better than your mother, so your old man
can't say much under the circumstances, and if he don't object, Poleon
can't. Just remember, you're alone with me in the heart of a
wilderness, and you've got to make a choice quick, because I'm going
ashore and make some breakfast as soon as it's light enough to choose a
landing-place. If you agree to come quietly and go through with this
thing like a sensible girl, I'll do what's right, but if you
don't--then I'll do what's wrong, and maybe you won't be so damned
anxious to tell your friends about this trip, or spread your story up
and down the river. Make up your mind before I land."

The water gurgled at the bow again, and the row-locks squeaked. Another
hour and then another passed in silence before the girl noted that she
no longer seemed to float through abysmal darkness, but that the river
showed in muddy grayness just over the gunwale. She saw Runnion more
clearly, too, and made out his hateful outlines, though for all else
she beheld they might have been miles out upon a placid sea, and so
imperceptible was the laggard day's approach that she could not measure
the growing light. It was a desolate dawn, and showed no glorious
gleams of color. There was no rose-pink glow, no merging of a thousand
tints, no final burst of gleaming gold; the night merely faded away,
changing to a sickly pallor that grew to ashen gray, and then dissolved
the low-hung, distorted shadows a quarter of a mile inland on either
hand into a forbidding row of unbroken forest backed by plain, morass,
and distant hills untipped by slanting rays. Overhead a bleak ruin of
clouds drifted; underneath the river ran, a bilious yellow. The whole
country so far as the eye could range was unmarred by the hand of man,
untracked save by the feet of the crafty forest people.

She saw Runnion gazing over his shoulder in search of a shelving beach
or bar, his profile showing more debased and mean than she had ever
noticed it before. They rounded a bend where the left bank crumbled
before the untiring teeth of the river, forming a bristling
chevaux-de-frise of leaning, fallen firs awash in the current. The
short side of the curve, the one nearest them, protected a gravel bar
that made down-stream to a dagger-like point, and towards this Runnion
propelled the skiff. The girl's heart sank and she felt her limbs grow
cold.

The mi