And hour by hour passed, and still I kept on swimming.  It was torture after the first.  I could rest as often as I needed, but the cold water palsied me, and I feared cramp.  My shoulder was feverish, and the pain of it sapped my strength.  Occasionally I found a log tangled in the reeds, and I pulled myself up on it into the sun.  If I had not been able to do that I could not have gone on.

With chill and fever and pain I had light-headed intervals.  These came as the afternoon waned, and while they lasted I thought that the woman was in the Seneca camp, and that I must get back to her.  Then I would turn and swim with the current, losing in a few minutes as much as I had gained in double the time.  Fortunately these seizures were brief, but they would leave me sick and shaken and grasping the reeds for support.  Another illusion came at this time:  I would hear the woman calling, calling my name.  Sometimes she cried that I had forsaken her.  That left me weaker than the fever of my wound.

It was impossible to see where I was going, for the reeds were high above my head, but so long as my reason lasted I steered by the sun.  I presume that I doubled many times, and lost much space, but that I do not know, for toward the end I traveled like an automaton.  I could not fix my mind on where I was going or why, but I kept repeating to myself that I must push against the current, and so, though I lost the idea at times, and found myself drifting, I think that I went some distance after my brain had ceased to direct.

And then I found peace.  My mind, freed of the burden of thinking of its surroundings, turned to the woman.  She called to me, talked to me, sometimes she walked the reeds at my side.  She was all smiles and lightness, and her tongue had never a barb.  I forgot to struggle.  The narrow channel where I had been fighting my way opened now into a broader passage, and the current flowed under me like an uplifting hand.  The woman’s voice called me from down-stream; I turned on my back, and floated, dreamy and expectant, toward the river’s mouth.

CHAPTER XXIII

I ENCOUNTER MIXED MOTIVES

I was called to semi-consciousness by the tinkling clamor of small bells, and by feeling my feet caught in something clinging yet yielding.  Then my body swung into it.  It was a web.  I pulled at it, and tried to brush it away.  And all the while the bells kept ringing, ringing.  A shower of arrows fell around me, and one grazed my foot.

A man must be far gone indeed when an arrow point will not sting him to life.  I was no longer a fever-riven log of driftwood.  I knew where I was and what was happening.  I had reached the Malhominis village.  Working through the rice swamp, I had come into the main river too far to the west, but following the woman’s voice I had floated back.  I was caught in one of the nets that the Malhominis strung with small bells, and stretched across the stream to keep both fish and enemies in bounds.  I set my teeth hard.