"You still think there is something crooked?" she murmured.
"How do I know?" said Ralph harshly. "I don't know anything about you!"
She abruptly turned her back on him. Her hands lifted and dropped in an odd, unconscious gesture. "I don' know w'at to do!" she whispered, more to herself than to him. The husky sound was charged with pain. "I come so far to get a doctor for my mot'er! But I cannot tell you!"
Ralph darted around the desk, and forced her to look at him. The dark eyes were soft and large with unshed tears. Beauty in distress is mighty to achieve. Moreover, Youth and Adventure and Romance were all on her side. Ralph melted like snow before a fire.
"Here! it's all right!" he said gruffly. "I'll come. If it's straight I promise not to tell!"
They shook hands on it, and Nahnya wiped her eyes apologetically.
They fell to discussing their arrangements.
"Get on the steamboat after dinner to-morrow," she said. "When you see me make out you don' know me at all. At Gisborne I will tell you what to do. Bring only blankets. I have a mosquito tent for you. I have plenty grub and everything."
Ralph passed the little moosehide bag to her.
She quickly put her hands behind her. "You must take it," she said. "I not want you work for nothing."
"I have taken it, see?" said Ralph, with a smile. "Now I pay it back to you for taking me on a trip. I've only been waiting for the chance to make a trip."
Once more their eyes met and contended, and again Ralph prevailed. She took the bag of gold-dust and put it back within her dress.
When she went, and Ralph was left alone in his tiny office, he sat down and endeavoured to put his thoughts in order. Straightway the soberer half of him asserted its rights, and half persuaded him that what had happened during the last hour was no more than a dream. It was too fantastic, too preposterous, for a matter-of-fact person to credit for a moment. That such a thing should happen to him, Ralph Cowdray, the patientless medico! But he looked down at his desk, and there in the cracks of the boards were lodged several shining yellow grains. The matter-of-fact Ralph retired defeated, and the dreamy Ralph had full sway.
"Gad! what eyes!" he thought. "She can't be more than twenty-one or so, and she looks as if she had sounded all the depths of life!"
The sight of his watch finally reminded Ralph of dinner. Dinner brought Dan to mind, and the thought of Dan recalled the subject of their jocular argument which Nahnya had interrupted. Ralph fell back in his chair amazed and dreamy.
"Romance!" he thought. "It did come in the door with her!"
II
ON BOARD THE "TEWKSBURY"
Next day Ralph's preparations for the journey consisted in throwing a change of clothes and a few necessaries into a canvas dunnage bag, rolling the bag inside the blankets from his bed, hoisting the bundle on his shoulder, and locking the door of his shack behind him. No one had been unduly surprised by his announcement that he was going up on the steamboat to have a look at the country. In the unconventional North a man's time is his own, and taking a trip is the best way to while it, and one day is as good as another to start on.
Even Dan Keach, knowing how bored Ralph had been, was unsuspicious of the sudden resolution. Dan was envious. "I wish to heaven I was going!" he said.
Ralph, knowing that Dan was firmly tied to his telegraph key, felt safe in echoing his wish. Ralph's breast was warmed by a delicious secret excitement. "If they knew!" he thought.
The captain of the steamboat, Wes' Trickett, a rakish, lubberly, fresh-water sailor, like his boat, likewise dined at Maroney's, and after dessert the company adjourned to the river bank, and sat about on piles of lumber to witness the departure. There was no haste about that. Agreeable gossip and humorous anecdote mingled with tobacco smoke. When conversation flagged, Wes' would say regretfully: "Wal, time to pull out, boys!" Whereupon some one would suggest a last touch at Maroney's bar, and the company would rise as a man with the same expression of deprecatory anticipation. Wes', since he supplied the excuse for the gathering, did not feel that it was incumbent on him to pay for anything.
The Tewksbury L. Swett lay at their feet, with steam up. Like the land buildings at Fort Edward, her architecture was of a casual and strictly utilitarian style. To paraphrase the description of a more famous vessel, she looked like a shoe-box on a shingle, with the addition atop the shoe-box of a lean-to pilot-house with nothing to lean to, and an attenuated smokestack. The stack was made of many lengths of kitchen stovepipe braced all round with a network of wires, which did not, however, quite smooth out the kinks in the joints. The whole thing had a decided inclination to the nor'east, but Wes' opined that it would do all right till it fell down.
Ralph had not seen his mysterious visitor since she had left his office. Loitering among the others on the bank, he was reassured by a glimpse of her sitting in a dark corner within the deckhouse, her back turned to the shore. To Ralph's secret relief, Dan did not remark her there. Dan had an awkward faculty of putting two and two together, and a caustic sense of humour.
Many of the old stories of the country were recounted for the benefit of the newcomers. "Ever hear tell of Tom Sadler?" said Captain Wes'. "Tom was the first white man who ever come up the Campbell Valley. Campbell hisself, when he discovered it, he only went downstream. It was mor'n fifty year ago, before the first Cariboo gold strike. In them days the city of Kimowin was no bigger than Fort Edward here. Tom Sadler was one of these here now rovin' fellers that can't rest easy among their own kind. He roved off up the Campbell Valley and was gone a whole year. The next summer he come back down the river, and capsized in the rapids just above Kimowin. They saw him from the settlement and pulled him out of the water more dead than alive. A living skellington he was at that. His canoe and his stuff was nachelly seen no more.
"Well, he hung on for a couple of days, and then he up and chivvied out. But that ain't the end of the story. The story is about what he told when he was out of his head. Nobody believed what he said, but they tell it to this day for a good story. He went on all about a purty little valley he found in the mountains. All around it was high cliffs that you couldn't get up or down like the sides of a bowl-like. Bowl of the Mountains was what Tom called it. He said the only way you could get in or out was through a long cave under the mountains. A bear that he was after showed him the way in, or he never wouldn't have found it, being the mouth was all hid behind bushes and all.
"Well, sirs, they say he said that little valley was as beautiful as Paradise; but that wa'n't all. In the middle of it were a little lake, different-coloured water from any on earth, green as a bottle-like, good water, too. Little streams come down from the mountains all around, and flowed through meadows of flowers into that lake, and Tom said the banks of all those little streams was yellow with gold, yellow with gold, sirs! Tom said he stayed there six months and washed two hundred pound of it. Them beside his bed laughed, him having nothing to show. If he'd been content with a hundred pounds, now, 'twould have sounded more reasonable. Well, they on'y laughed at Tom and buried him. And it's got to be a saying-like 'round Kimowin when a feller gets a bee in his bonnet, 'Oh he's found Bowl of the Mountains!' they say. But I ain't so sure there ain't something in it. I seen Tom's grave in the cemetery at Kimowin: 'Thomas Sadler, who bit July 9th, 1861.' I seen it myself carved on the stone. That ain't no hearsay."
Finally about three o'clock, nobody else being disposed to "buy," although Wes' provided several good openings, the captain and the passengers made their final farewells and went aboard. The little Tewksbury backed out of the mud, and turned her nose upstream, with a heave and a snort at every stroke of the piston, and a great kick-up astern. The little group on the shore adjourned again to Maroney's for something to pick