For awhile she remained spellbound by the vision. She remembered. Oh, yes. There could be no mistake. Five large canoes and two smaller. That had been the extent of Bill Wilder’s outfit as she had first discovered it. It was he. He was coming up the river. He had returned. And—he had returned sooner than he promised.
A wild tumult of feeling consumed her as she stared at the distant procession of boats. Then, in a moment, a surge of colour swept up into her cheeks, and a fierce panic of shame robbed her of all her delight. She turned; tearing herself from the glad sight, and fled headlong to her kyak below.
Hesther was perturbed, yet she was engaged on the task of all tasks which appealed to her in her life’s routine.
It was wash-day. She was standing over a boiler of steaming water, frothing with soap suds and full of a laundry made up of the rainbow hues of a Joseph’s coat. The kitchen was reeking with steam. It was also littered with piles of well-wrung garments awaiting the services of Mary Justicia for transfer to the drying ground outside. The swarming flies were more than usually sticky in the humid atmosphere, and the prevailing confusion in the rough living room was as splendid as the most ardent housewife could have desired on such an occasion.
Perturbation with Hesther could only have one source. Something must be amiss with one of the large family for which she held herself responsible. Nothing else could have disturbed her equanimity. She was completely single-minded and even in her emotions. Beyond the four walls of her house she had no concern. She was utterly abandoned to the six young lives entrusted to her efforts by her dead husband, and the girl who, from her earliest infancy, had been called “the Kid.”
It was of the Kid she was thinking now. Their talk of the day before had filled her with disquiet. The girl had denied so much, and yet, to the patient mother-woman, there had been signs that only afforded one interpretation.
And now she was asking herself all the many questions which her woman’s heart instinctively prompted. Who was the man? Where was the man? When had the Kid encountered the man? What was he like? How far had this thing gone that it had stirred the child to a fever of excited interest in another woman’s love for her man? She was mystified beyond words. None but trailmen and trappers had come near them throughout the years. They were mostly half-breeds and Eskimos, and one or two poor whites who thought of nothing but the mean living they were able to scratch out of this Euralian-ridden territory.