He looked again toward the raft.  The current and the sweeps and the tugging boats were drawing it steadily nearer.  Standing at the very edge of it he saw now a solitary figure, and in the clear sunlight the man stood out clean-cut as a carven statue.  He was a giant in size.  His head and arms were bare, and he was looking steadily toward the bateau and the approaching York boat.  He raised an arm, and a moment later the movement was followed by a voice that rose above all other voices.  It boomed over the river like the rumble of a gun.  In response to it Marie-Anne waved the white thing in her hand, and David thought he heard her voice in an answering cry.  He stared again at the solitary figure of the man, seeing nothing else, hearing no other sound but the booming of the deep cry that came again over the river.  His heart was thumping.  In his eyes was a gathering fire.  His body grew tense.  For he knew that at last he was looking at St. Pierre, chief of the Boulains, and husband of the woman he loved.

As the significance of the situation grew upon him, a flash of his old humor returned.  It was the same grim humor that had possessed him behind the rock, when he had thought he was going to die.  Fate had played him a dishonest turn then, and it was doing the same thing by him now.  Unless he deliberately turned his face away, he was going to see the reunion of Marie-Anne and St. Pierre.

Yesterday he had strapped his binoculars to his belt.  Today Marie-Anne had looked through them a dozen times.  They had been a source of pleasure and thrill to her.  Now, David thought, they would be good medicine for him.  He would see the whole thing through, and at close range.  He would leave himself no room for doubt.  He had laughed behind the rock, when bullets were zipping close to his head, and the same grim smile came to his lips now as he focused his glasses on the solitary figure at the head of the raft.

The smile died away when he saw St. Pierre.  It was as if he could reach out and touch him with his hand.  And never, he thought, had he seen such a man.  A moment before, a flashing vision had come to him from out of an Arabian desert; the multitude of colored tents, the half-naked men, the great raft floating almost without perceptible motion on the placid breast of the river had stirred his imagination until he saw a strange picture.  But there was nothing Arabic, nothing desert-like, in this man his binoculars brought within a few feet of his eyes.  He was more like a viking pirate who had roved the sea a few centuries ago.  One great, bare arm was raised as David looked, and his booming voice was rolling over the river again.  His hair was shaggy, and untrimmed, and red; he wore a short beard that glistened in the sun—­he was laughing as he waved and shouted to Marie-Anne—­a joyous, splendid giant of a man who seemed almost on the point of leaping into the water in his eagerness to clasp in his naked arms the woman who was coming to him.