“Ready!” he cried.  “He’ll take the water like a fish, and we can pick him up afterward—­Now!”

I heard the clean-cut dive of the Indian, and struck the paddle deep to balance Jennifer’s stroke.  But as I bent to put my back into it, some flying missile caught me fair behind the ear, and but for Jennifer’s quick wit I should have swamped the crazy shallop.  In a flash he jerked me flat between his knees and sent the pirogue with a mighty thrust beyond the zone of fire light.

At that, though all the sense was beaten out of me, I was alive enough to hear the savage yells of disappointed rage behind us; these and the spitting crackle of a dozen rifles fired at random in the darkness.  But afterward all sounds, save the rhythmic dip and drip of Jennifer’s paddle, faded on the sense of hearing till, as it would seem, this gentle monody of dipping blade and tinkling drops became a crooning lullaby to blot out all the years that lay between, and make me once again a little child sinking asleep in my young mother’s arms.

XVI

HOW JENNIFER THREW A MAIN WITH DEATH

’Tis a sure mark of healthful sleep that it never makes account of time.  No odds how long the night, ’tis but a moment from the lapse of consciousness to its recovery in the morning.  But this deep sleep that crept upon me as I lay in the pirogue, listening to the tinkling drip from Jennifer’s paddle, was not of healthful weariness; and when I came awake from it there was a dim and troubled vista of vague and broken dreams to measure off the longest night I could ever remember.

The place of this awakening was a burrow in the earth.  My bed of bearskins over fragrant pine-tufts was spread upon the ground, and by the flickering light of a handful of fire I could see the earth walls of the burrow, which were worn smooth as if the place had been the well-used den of some wild creature.  But overhead there was the mark of human occupancy, since the earth-arch was sooted and blackened with the reek of many fires.

When I stirred there was another stir beyond the handful of fire, and Jennifer came to kneel beside me, taking my hand and chafing it as a tender-hearted woman might, and asking if I knew him.

“Know you?  Why should I not?” I said, wondering why the words took so many breaths between.

“O Jack!” was all I had in answer; but when he had found a tongue to babble out his joy, I learned the why and wherefore.  Once more grim death had reached for me, lying await in the twirled tomahawk that set me dreaming of my mother’s lap and lullaby.  For a week I had lain here upon the bed of pine-tufts, poised upon the brink of the death pit with only my dear lad to hold and draw me back.

“A week?” I queried, when he had named the interval.  “And you have been here all the time?”

“I’ve never left you, save to forage for the pot,” he admitted.  “I dared not leave you, Jack.”