insured her mental engagement.

She had lived so many years in combat with grim necessity that the
lesson of thrift of all her resources had been brought home to her.
Having been waylaid by circumstance so often, she took grim care now to
count the costs, and to insure her getting what she was seeking. The
trouble was she could not disassociate her feelings from her ideas. They
were inextricably interwoven. The brief years of her wedlock had been in
one way a disillusionment, in another a revelation.

She had found her own hunger for learning, her own strength and
weakness, and while she had lost to the Widow Plosell, she had clearly
seen that it was not her fault but Gus Carline's meagreness of mind and
shallowness of soul. Instead of losing her confidence, she had found her
own ability.

For hours she debated there by her pretty lamp, with the curtains down,
and the comforting and reassuring weight of the automatic pistol in her
lap. She knew that she must never have that weapon at arm's length from
her, but as she remembered where it had come from she wondered to think
that she had so easily refused the suggestion of Frank, the market
hunter.

"It's all right, though," she shrugged her shoulders, "I can take care
of myself, and being alone, I can think things out!"

In mid-morning she cut loose from the bank and floated away down stream.
The river was very wide, and covered with crossing-ripples. She looked
down what the map showed was the chute of Hacker Tow Head, and then the
current carried her almost to the bank at the head of Buffalo Island.

Here there was a stretch of caving bank; the earth, undercut by the
river current, was lumping off in chunks and slices. Her boat bobbed and
danced in the waves from the cave-ins, and the rocking pleased her
fancy.

The names along this bit of river awakened her interest; Blackbird
Island was clearly described: Buffalo Island harked back many years into
tradition; Dogtooth Island was a matter of river shape; but Saladin,
Tow Head and Orient Field stirred her imagination, for they might reveal
the scene of steamboat disasters or some surveyor's memory of the
Arabian Nights. Below Dogtooth Island, under Brooks Point, were a number
of golden sandbars and farther down, in the lower curve of the famous
S-bends she read the name "Greenleaf," which was pretty and
picturesque.

She was living! Every minute called upon some resource of her brain. She
had read in old books