time and the torn tie-ribs of old earth. Mrs. Carter came in softly; asked for and accepted the woman's eternal excuse of a headache; undressed and climbed into the upper bunk. Jennifer lay still with her eyes on the dark now, and the steamer moved on with the strange hush of midnight around it.
The engine heart-beat stopped suddenly with a shudder like the coming of death. Men called; moccasined feet pattered the decks and the gang-plank ran out with complaining squeals. Jennifer slid off the bunk and looked from the unglassed eight-inch window. The boat lay along a tall, dark bank where the pines were jewelled on their tops by the stars. A flare glowed redly over the gang-plank and over a string of silent, stooping figures which trod up it slow and burdened and ran back swift and lightly. To Jennifer came the fancy that each man brought his burden of sins across the bridge of repentance and turned earthward to his work again, glad and forgiven.
She had seen river-steamers wooding-up many times before this. But the dark pines and the white face of the stacked timber; the red, uncertain flare and the silent bowed procession moving in moccasined stealthiness took the blank reality from it. And then she saw Dick, treading the plank with sure light feet; bare-armed where he gripped the rough wood; bare-throated where the black head rose beside it. He passed, with a flickering dark shadow behind him, and Jennifer crept back to the bunk because she dared not watch for that figure again.
But long after the flare died out; long after the steamer sheered into the stream, and the talk and tread of men in the alley-way ceased, and the smell of tobacco grew fainter, Jennifer stole back to the window, and saw the stars wheel their courses under the eye of the moon. There was no sleep for her where all the world was dreaming.
For a man may sweat his present devils out by savage work. But a woman must pray them out—or let them stay.
