A quarter of a mile beyond the poplar thicket they came to the edge of the spruce and cedar timber, and Soon the thick walls of the forest shut them in, sheltering them from the wind, but the blackness was even more like that of a bottomless pit.  Kent had noticed that the thunder and lightning were drifting steadily eastward, and now the occasional flashes of electrical fire scarcely illumined the trail ahead of them.  The rain was not beating so fiercely.  They could hear the wail of the spruce and cedar tops and the slush of their boots in mud and water.  An interval came, where the spruce-tops met overhead, when it was almost calm.  It was then that Kent threw out of him a great, deep breath and laughed joyously and exultantly.

“Are you wet, little Gray Goose?”

“Only outside, Big Otter.  My feathers have kept me dry.”

Her voice had a trembling, half-sobbing, half-rejoicing note in it.  It was not the voice of one who had recently killed a man.  In it was a pathos which Kent knew she was trying to hide behind brave words.  Her hands clung to the arm of his rubber slicker even as they stood there, close together, as if she was afraid something might drag them apart in that treacherous gloom.  Kent, fumbling for a moment, drew from an inner pocket a dry handkerchief.  Then he found her face, tilted it a bit upward, and wiped it dry.  He might have done the same thing to a child who had been crying.  After that he scrubbed his own, and they went on, his arm about her again.

It was half a mile from the edge of the forest to the bayou, and half a dozen times in that distance Kent took the girl in his arms and carried her through water that almost reached his boot tops.  The lightning no longer served them.  The rain still fell steadily, but the wind had gone with the eastward sweep of the storm.  Close-hung with the forest walls, the bayou itself was indiscernible in the blackness.  Marette guided him now, though Kent walked ahead of her, holding firmly to her hand.  Unless Fingers had changed its location, the scow should be somewhere within forty or fifty paces of the end of the trail.  It was small, a two-man scow, with a tight little house built amidships.  And it was tied close up against the shore.  Marette told him this as they felt their way through brush and reeds.  Then he stumbled against something taut and knee-high, and he found it was the tie-rope.

Leaving Marette with her back to the anchor tree, he went aboard.  The water was three or four inches deep in the bottom of the scow, but the cabin was built on a platform raised above the floor of the boat, and Kent hoped it was still dry.  He groped until he found the twisted wire which held the door shut.  Opening it, he ducked his head low and entered.  The little room was not more than four feet high, and for greater convenience he fell upon his knees while fumbling under his slicker for his water-proof box of matches.  The water had not yet risen above the floor.