Another hour and then another passed in silence before the girl
noted that she no longer seemed to float through abysmal darkness,
but that the river showed in muddy grayness just over the gunwale.
She saw Runnion more clearly, too, and made out his hateful
outlines, though for all else she beheld they might have been miles
out upon a placid sea, and so imperceptible was the laggard day's
approach that she could not measure the growing light. It was a
desolate dawn, and showed no glorious gleams of color. There was no
rose-pink glow, no merging of a thousand tints, no final burst of
gleaming gold; the night merely faded away, changing to a sickly
pallor that grew to ashen gray, and then dissolved the low-hung,
distorted shadows a quarter of a mile inland on either hand into a
forbidding row of unbroken forest backed by plain, morass, and
distant hills untipped by slanting rays. Overhead a bleak ruin of
clouds drifted; underneath the river ran, a bilious yellow. The
whole country so far as the eye could range was unmarred by the hand
of man, untracked save by the feet of the crafty forest people.

She saw Runnion gazing over his shoulder in search of a shelving
beach or bar, his profile showing more debased and mean than she had
ever noticed it before. They rounded a bend where the left bank
crumbled before the untiring teeth of the river, forming a bristling
chevaux-de-frise of leaning, fallen firs awash in the current. The
short side of the curve, the one nearest them, protected a gravel
bar that made down-stream to a dagger-like point, and towards this
Runnion propelled the skiff. The girl's heart sank and she felt her
limbs grow cold.

The mind of Poleon Doret worked in straight lines. Moreover, his
memory was good. Stark's statement, which so upset Gale and the