them, and some one has been drawing us pails of water to wash with ever since we came aboard."
"Who is Mrs. Carter?" asked Dick idly. But he was watching her face.
"Wife of the missionary at Fort Resolution," Jennifer turned on him. "She sent her daughter out to school ten years ago, and now she has been to Moosejaw to see her married. It was the first time she had been out in eighteen years, and she is going back to perhaps eighteen more. It is not only you men who serve this great North-West of ours."
"And it is not only you women who know it."
"I know that it is better to work without being satisfied than to be satisfied without having worked. But—oh dear!—she is so good that she makes me feel horribly bad."
"Take me as a palliative, then. On that basis I ought to make you feel horribly good. And—do you think that I will possibly be able to exist in proximity with Mrs. Carter?"
Jennifer laughed. But she shivered. A sudden wind from the wing of the future had touched her, and the woman in her feared the unknown even as the girl in her reached out for it.
They talked in the new knowledge that had come to Jennifer through these days when she had watched the red sun sink and the long dusks darken the river, and had learnt the slang and the run of the river-work and dipped deep in the lives of the many men and the one woman about her. And then that flat-chested, grey-haired woman with the brave bright eyes interrupted them, and Dick went away to smoke and to think.
He had no intention to arrest Robison so long as more might be learned by leaving him free. What was to be learned he did not know yet. But he meant to watch; and Ducane knew it, and said so to Jennifer that night, taking her up to the very nose of the steamer, among the windlasses and the warping ropes with the silky water parting a few feet below and day yet hanging in the sunset colours. He hid his face against Jennifer's sleeve as he lay on the poop, turning to her as to an infinite well from which he could draw his courage.
