The Country Beyond Part 30

Her voice trembled a little in the gloom.

"No, I am not afraid. But it is dark--so dark--"

"The moon will be with us again in a few nights--your moon, with the Old Man smiling down on us. I know how the Man in the Moon must feel when he's on the other side of the world, and can't see you, Nada."

Her silence made him lean toward her, striving to get a better view of her face where the starlight broke through an opening in the tree-tops.

And in that moment he heard a little breath that was almost a sob.

"It's Peter," she said, before he could speak. "Oh, Roger, why didn't we bring Peter?"

"Possibly--we should have," he replied, skipping a stroke with his paddle. "But I think we have done the best thing for Peter. He is a wilderness dog, and has never known anything different. Over there, where we are going--"

"I understand. And some day, Father John will bring him?"

"Yes. He has promised that. Peter will come to us when Father John comes."

She had turned, looking into the pit-gloom ahead of them, so dark that the canoe seemed about to drive against a wall. Under its bow the water gurgled like oil.

"We are entering the big cedar swamp," he explained. "It is like Blind Man's Buff, isn't it? Can you see?"

"Not beyond the bow of the canoe, Roger."

"Work back to me," he said, "very carefully."

She came, obediently.

"Now turn slowly, so that you face the bow, and lean back with your head against my knees."

This also, she did.

"This is much nicer," she whispered, nestling her head comfortably against him. "So much nicer."

By leaning over until his back nearly cracked he was able to find her lips in the darkness.

"I was thinking of the brush that overhangs the stream," he explained when he had straightened himself. "Sitting up as you were it might have caused you hurt."

There was a little silence between them, in which his paddle caught again its slow and steady rhythm. Then,

"Were you thinking only of the brush, Roger--and of the hurt it might cause me?"

"Yes, only of that," and he chuckled softly.

"Then I don't think it nice here at all," she complained. "I shall sit up straight so the brush may put my eyes out!"

But her head pressed even closer against him, and careful not to interrupt his paddle-stroke she touched his face for an instant with her hand.

"It's there," she purled, as if utterly comforted. "I wanted to be sure--it is so dark!"

With cimmerian blackness on all sides of them, and a chaotic tunnel ahead, they were happy. Staring straight before him, though utterly unable to see, McKay sensed in every movement he made and in every breath he drew the exquisite thrill of a miracle. And the same thrill swept into him and through him from the softly breathing body of Nada.

Light or darkness made no difference now. Together, inseparable from this time forth, they had started on the one great adventure of their lives, and for them fear had ceased to exist. The night sheltered them.

Its very blackness held in its embrace a warmth of welcome and of unending hope. Twice in the next half hour he put his hand to Nada's face, and each time she pressed her lips against it, sweet with that confidence which so completely possessed her soul.

Very slowly they moved through the swamp, for because of the gloom his paddle-strokes were exceedingly short, and he was feeling his way.

Frequently he ran into brush, or struck the boggy sh.o.r.e, and occasionally Nada would hold lighted matches while he extricated the canoe from tree-tops and driftwood that impeded the way. He loved the brief glimpses he caught of her face in the match-glow, and twice he deliberately wasted the tiny flares that he might hold the vision of her a little longer.

At last he began to feel the pulse of a current against his paddle, and soon after that the star-mist began filtering through the thinning tree-tops again, so that he knew they were almost through the swamp.

Another half-hour and they were free of it, with a clear sky overhead and the cheering song of running water on both sides of them.

Nada sat up, and it was now so light that he could see the soft s.h.i.+mmer of her hair in the starlight. He also saw a pretty little grimace in her face, even as she smiled at him.

"I--I can't move," she exclaimed. "_Ugh_! my feet are asleep--"

"We'll go ash.o.r.e and stretch ourselves," said McKay, who had looked at his watch in the light of the last match. "We've two hours the start of Breault, and there is no other canoe."

He began watching the sh.o.r.e closely, and it was not long before he made out the white smoothness of a sandbar on their right. Here they landed and for half an hour rested their cramped limbs.

Then they went on, and in his heart McKay blessed the deep swamp that lay between them and Breault.

"I don't think he can make it without a canoe, even if he guesses we went this way," he explained to Nada. "And that means--we are safe."

There was a cheery ring in his voice which would have changed to the deadness of cold iron could he have looked back into that sluggish pit of the Burntwood through which they had come, or could he have seen into the heart of the still blacker swamp.

For through the swamp, feeling his way in the black abysses and amid the monster-ghosts of darkness, came Peter.

And down the Burntwood, between the boggy mucklips of the swamp, a man followed with slow but deadly surety, guiding with a long pole two light cedar timbers which he had lashed together with wire, and which bore him safely and in triumph where the canoe had gone before him.

This man was Breault, the man-hunter.

"The swamp will hold him!" McKay was saying again, exultantly. "Even if he guesses our way, the swamp will hold him back, Nada."

"But he won't know the way we have come," cried Nada, the faith in her voice answering his own. "Father John will guide him in another direction."

Back in the pit-gloom, with a grim smile now and then relaxing the tight-set compression of his thin lips, and with eyes that stared like a night-owl's into the gloom ahead of him, Breault poled steadily on.

CHAPTER XXII

Dripping from the bog-holes and lathered with mud, it was the mystery of Breault's noiseless presence somewhere near him in the still night that drew Peter continually deeper into the swamp.

Half a dozen times he caught the scent of him in a quiet air that seemed only now and then to rise up in his face softly, as if stirred by b.u.t.terflies' wings. Always it came from ahead, and Peter's mind worked swiftly to the decision that where Breault was there also would be Nada and Jolly Roger. Yet he caught the scent of neither of these two, and that puzzled him.

Many times he found himself at the edge of the black lip of water, but never quite at the right time to see a shadow in its darkness, or hear the sound of Breault's pole.

But in the swamp, as he went on, he saw nothing but shadow, and heard weird and nameless sounds which made his blood creep, even though his courage was now full-grown within him.