ida the latter anticipated the coming by
running to meet them. She took the little bride in her arms.

The priest, Felix, and the governor swapped looks and nods which
indorsed an understanding that was wordless between the young women.

When Lida turned from the governor's daughter she saw the governor
himself coming toward her. He held out the cant dog; it lay across his
palms and he tendered it respectfully.

She winked the mist of tears from her eyes and struggled with a
hysterical desire to babble many words.

"Hush!" warned the priest. "We all know!"

There, in a golden silence, she realized how cheap and base was the
clinking metal of speech that had been the currency of herself and
others in the crowded town.

The river, slowed by the deadwater, was mute, though its foam streaks
showed where it had crashed through the gorges above. A few chickadees
chirruped bravely. There were no other sounds while the girl took the
Flagg scepter in her own hands.

She walked with Felix to the shore, where the flotilla of canoes lay
upturned at the pull-out place. Again the Oronos were assigned to her,
and she was comforted much because they no longer seemed like strangers.

"Au revoir!" called Father Leroque when the canoes were afloat on the
brown flood. "I'm making haste to the Tomah, mam'selle, to keep my
promise!"

He had already accomplished so much for her! In her new thanksgiving
spirit she was finding it easy to believe that he could bring about what
her self-acknowledged love for Latisan so earnestly desired.

In single file, holding close to the shore, the canoes went toward the
north. There was no talk between those who paddled; against the brown
shore the canoes were merely moving smudges.

Rufus Craig, coming down the middle of the deadwater in one of the
great bateaus of the Comas company, paid no attention to the smudges.
The bateau rode high and rapidly on the flood that moved down the
channel. Craig was writing in his notebook and four oarsmen were obeying
his command to dip deep and pull strong.

Craig had met Ben Kyle by appointment at the foot of the Oxbow portage
and he had found Kyle to be particularly malevolent and entirely
willing--and Kyle had gone north to the Flagg drive in the pay of the
Three C's.

It had been a profitable interview, as Director Craig viewed it.

Now he was chasing along the trail of rumor to Adonia; the rumor was
encouraging. If Latisan really had been pried out