The girl buttoned her sweater closer about her throat.  The man stuffed tobacco into the bowl of his pipe and bent low to kindle it into a cheerful spot of light.

A belated lemon afterglow lingered at the edge of the sky ahead.  Against it the gaunt branches of a tall tree traced themselves starkly.  Below was the silent blackness of the woods.

Suddenly Benton raised his head.

“I have a present for you,” he announced.

“A present?” echoed the girl.  “Be careful, Sir Gray Eyes.  You played the magician once and gave me a rose.  It was such a wonderful rose”—­she spoke almost tenderly,—­“that it has spoiled me.  No commonplace gift will be tolerated after that.”

“This is a different sort of present,” he assured her.  “This is a god.”

“A what!” Cara was at the stern with the guiding paddle.  The man leaned back, steadying the canoe with a hand on each gunwale, and smiled into her face.

“Yes,” he said, “he is a god made out of clay with a countenance that is most unlovely and a complexion like an earthenware jar.  I acquired him in the Andes for a few centavos.  Since then we have been companions.  In his day he had his place in a splendid temple of the Sun Worshipers.  When I rescued him he was squatting cross-legged on a counter among silver and copper trinkets belonging to a civilization younger than his own.  When you’ve been a god and come to be a souvenir of ruins and dead things—­” the man paused for a moment, then with the ghost of a laugh went on, “—­it makes you see things differently.  In the twisted squint of his small clay face one reads slight regard for mere systems and codes.”

He paused so long that she prompted him in a voice that threatened to become unsteady.  “Tell me more about him.  What is his godship’s name?”

“He looked so protestingly wise,” Benton went on, “that I named him Jonesy.  I liked that name because it fitted him so badly.  Jonesy is not conventional in his ideas, but his morals are sound.  He has seen religions and civilizations and dynasties flourish and decay, and it has all given him a certain perspective on life.  He has occasionally given me good council.”

He paused again, but, noting that the singing voices were drawing nearer, he continued more rapidly.

“In Alaska I used to lie flat on my cot before a great open fire and his god-ship would perch cross-legged on my chest.  When I breathed, he seemed to shake his fat sides and laugh.  When a pagan god from Peru laughs at you in a Yukon cabin, the situation calls for attention.  I gave attention.

“Jonesy said that the major human motives sweep in deep channels, full-tide ahead.  He said you might in some degree regulate their floods by rearing abutments, but that when you try to build a dam to stop the Amazon you are dealing with folly.  He argued that when one sets out to dam up the tides set flowing back in the tributaries of the heart it is written that one must fail.  That is the gospel according to Jonesy.”