Leave Her to Heaven Read Free Page A

a strength he did not possess. So he sat where he was till Leick came up the path to face him; and when the other paused he said honestly:
    â€˜I got this far, Leick, but I played out.’
    Leick nodded, assenting calmly. ‘Take your time,’ he advised. ‘I’ll need a couple more trips myself.’ He went on down to the landing by the dam, wisely leaving Harland to fight his battle out alone.
    Harland rose and resumed his burdens and proceeded. When Leick, bowed under the bulk of fly and bedrolls, overtook him, he moved aside to let the other pass and followed on. His depression
had somehow vanished. Perhaps the deep and labored breathing provoked by that first short ascent had purged his lungs, had burned out some of the sooty dregs with which they were encrusted. He was sweating freely now, like a squeezed sponge, and he savored the salt taste on his lips and found it good. Leick went on and disappeared, and Harland stopped once to rest — he merely paused this time, without sitting down — and then proceeded. When he met Leick returning, the guide grinned approvingly.
    â€˜Keep straight ahead,’ he said with a backward nod to show the way. ‘You’ll see the canoe. I’ll fetch the rest of it this time.’
    When, a few rods farther, Harland came down to the waterside, it was where a considerable tributary brook flowed into the main stream; and the River even in this half-mile had drawn reinforcements from little spring brooks, so that it bore now enough water to free the canoe. Yet Harland knew that there would still be shallow reaches where he might need to wade, perhaps to help Leick drag or carry the loaded canoe across these obstacles into deeper water. There were boots in his duffel, but he chose instead a pair of shoe pacs, and he changed his clothes too, stowing coat and trousers away in a careless roll, thinking with a grim satisfaction that whether his trousers were creased would not matter soon again. He put on stag pants and a flannel shirt which Leick had brought for him from Back of the Moon; and in the well-worn garments — a little too big for him now, for he had lost weight in these months while his muscles turned to fat — he felt strong and alive again. He caught himself starting to sing, and checked suddenly, long habit of silence clamping his lips; but then he remembered that he could sing now if he chose, and he flung back his head and like a dog that bays the moon, he shouted at the serene and cloud-swept sky:
    â€˜Oh a capital ship for an ocean trip
Was the Walloping Window Blind...’
    He wondered why he sang that particular song. The words had not entered his mind for — how long? Then he remembered the
last time he heard the song, and the past pressed down on him again, silencing him, bowing his shoulders under a load that seemed unbearable.
    When Leick returned, Harland was lying on the gravel bar beside the water, his duffel bag for a pillow, his arm across his eyes against the bright sky and the sun. Leick said in approval of his change of costume: ‘Well, you look more natural!’ But Harland did not speak nor stir till by the sounds he knew the canoe was loaded. Then he rose, and Leick without a word put the duffel bag in place in the canoe, and set the craft afloat, and steadied it while Harland stepped in.
    To float free upon the mirror surface of the infant River was a release; but it was not yet all easy going, for sometimes there were sunny rips where the clear bright water sparkled and chuckled over gravel, and the canoe might scrape or even ground. At such times Leick, stepping out into the water and coming to the bow to drag the canoe a few feet, always freed it quickly. At frequent intervals lesser streams added their waters to the larger. The travellers came to a region where beaver had been active centuries ago, their dams backing up the water and catching silt and gravel in the spring floods till they had