“Father, rouse yourself a little.”  She took Markham’s old felt hat, upon which the insensible head was lying, and set it warmly over his brow.  She unfastened the bands that tied his body to the log.  She had not come without a small phial of the rum that was always necessary for her father, in the hope that she might find him alive.  She soaked some morsels of bread in this, and put it in the mouth of the man over whom she was working.  It was very dark; the only marvel was, not that she did not recognise Toyner, but that she and he were not both engulfed in the black flood beneath them in the struggle which she made to take him in the canoe.

Twice that day Toyner had stirred and become conscious; but consciousness, except that of confused dreams, had again deserted him.  The lack of food, if it had preserved him from fever, had caused the utmost weakness of all his bodily powers; yet when the small amount of bread and rum which he could swallow gave him a little strength, he was roused, not to the extent of knowing who he was or where, but enough to move his muscles, although feebly, under direction.  After a long time she had him safely in the bottom of the canoe, his head lying upon her jacket which she had folded for a pillow.  At first, as she began to paddle the canoe forward, he groaned again and again, but by degrees the reaction of weakness after exertion made him lapse into his former state that seemed like sleep.

Ann had lost now all her fears of unknown and unseen dangers.  All that she feared was the loss of her way, or the upsetting of her boat.  The strength that she put into the strokes of her paddle was marvellous.  She had just a mile to go before she came to another place where a stretch of still water opened through the trees.  There were several of these blind channels opening off the bed of the Ahwewee.  They were the terror of those who were travelling in boats, for they were easily mistaken for the river itself, and they led to nothing but impenetrable marsh.  From this particular inlet David Brown had discovered a passage to the land, and Ann pursued the new untried way boldly.  Somewhere farther on David had told her a little creek flowed in where the eye could not discern any wider opening than was constantly the case between the drowned trees.  Its effect upon the current of the water was said to be so slight that the only way to discover where it ran was by throwing some light particles upon the water and watching to see whether they drifted outwards from the wood steadily.  She turned the boat gently against a broken stump from which she could take a decaying fragment.  An hour passed.  She wearily crossed the water to and fro, casting out her chips of punk, straining her eyes to see their motion in the moonlight.  The breeze that had moved the smoke had gone again.  Above the moon rode through white fleecy clouds.  The water and air lay still and warm, inter-penetrated with the white light.  The trees, without leaf or twigs, cast no shadow with the moon in the zenith.