“Thar ain’t anyone to send,” said Morse, quietly.

“Do you mean to say you are all alone here?”

“Yes.

“And you fished me out—­all by yourself?”

“Yes.”

The stranger again examined him curiously.  Then he suddenly stretched out his hand and grasped his companion’s.

“All right; if you can’t send, I reckon I can manage to walk over there tomorrow.”

“I was goin’ on to say,” said Morse, simply, “that if you’ll lie by tonight, I’ll start over sunup, after puttin’ out the cattle, and fetch you back a horse afore noon.”

“That’s enough.”  He, however, remained looking curiously at Morse.  “Did you never hear,” he said, with a singular smile, “that it was about the meanest kind of luck that could happen to you to save a drowning man?”

“No,” said Morse, simply.  “I reckon it orter be the meanest if you didn’t.”

“That depends upon the man you save,” said the stranger, with the same ambiguous smile, “and whether the saving him is only putting things off.  Look here,” he added, with an abrupt return to his imperative style, “can’t you give me some dry clothes?”

Morse brought him a pair of overalls and a “hickory shirt,” well worn, but smelling strongly of a recent wash with coarse soap.  The stranger put them on while his companion busied himself in collecting a pile of sticks and dry leaves.

“What’s that for?” said the stranger, suddenly.

“A fire to dry your clothes.”

The stranger calmly kicked the pile aside.

“Not any fire tonight if I know it,” he said, brusquely.  Before Morse could resent his quickly changing moods he continued, in another tone, dropping to an easy reclining position beneath the tree, “Now, tell me all about yourself, and what you are doing here.”

Thus commanded, Morse patiently repeated his story from the time he had left his backwoods cabin to his selection of the river bank for a “location.”  He pointed out the rich quality of this alluvial bottom and its adaptability for the raising of stock, which he hoped soon to acquire.  The stranger smiled grimly, raised himself to a sitting position, and, taking a penknife from his damp clothes, began to clean his nails in the bright moonlight—­an occupation which made the simple Morse wander vaguely in his narration.

“And you don’t know that this hole will give you chills and fever till you’ll shake yourself out of your boots?”

Morse had lived before in aguish districts, and had no fear.

“And you never heard that some night the whole river will rise up and walk over you and your cabin and your stock?”

“No.  For I reckon to move my shanty farther back.”

The man shut up his penknife with a click and rose.

“If you’ve got to get up at sunrise, we’d better be turning in.  I suppose you can give me a pair of blankets?”