“Yes, master.”

“Madame de Montlivet is your special care till I return.”

CHAPTER XIX

IN THE MIST

I slipped off in grayness the next morning.  There was a water fog that hugged me clammily, and sounds echoed in it as in a metal canopy.  I could not have found my way in open water, but here I could crowd tight to the shore and keep my bearings.  I took a keg of pitch with me, for when I saw the weather I knew that I would give the canoe many a scrape on rocks and snags.

It was tedious traveling, and it seemed a long time before I made my worming way around every inequality in the shore and reached the inlet where we had eaten lunch.  Here I lifted the canoe, turned it bottom side up in the meadow, and covered it with a sailcloth.  I wanted it to dry, and the air was still dripping moisture.  I had expected the fog to lift before this, but it seemed to be growing heavier.

I tried to light my pipe, but the tobacco was damp and would not burn.  Slow drops dribbled from the trees and the meadow was soggy.  Where should I go?  I could hear nothing, and as for seeing anything I could have passed my own camp a rod away.  It began to seem a fool’s errand.  I thought of returning.

Perhaps it was a boyish feeling that took me to the sycamore.  I looked about.  The ashes of our little fire still lay in a rounded pile, and at the edge of the pile, printed deep in the yielding surface, was a moccasin print.  It was not the woman’s moccasin, nor my own boot.  One look showed me that.

And then I went over the surrounding ground.  I learned nothing, for pebbles and short grass are as non-committal as a Paris pavement.  The print had been made before the mist fell, for the dew was unbrushed.  I looked at the encircling forest, and its dripping uniformity gave no clue.  I knocked the charred tobacco from my pipe, pulled my hat down on my ears, and plunged straight ahead.

It was a fool’s way of going at the matter, but a fool has as good a chance as a philosopher in such a case.  I clove my way through the mist as blind and breathless as a swimmer in a breaker.  The forest was thickly grown and the trees stood about me as alike as water-reeds.  Whenever I touched one it pelted me with drops, and I was numbed with cold.  My feet slipped, for the ground was slimy with wet.  But I was not thinking of comfort, nor of speed.  I was listening.

For the strange, gray air was trembling with echoes.  Every snapped twig, every bird murmur, every brush of a padded foot on leaf mould was multiplied many-fold.  The fog was a sounding-board.  All the spectral space around me, above me, below me was quivering and talking.  My very breath was peopled with murmurs.  I have been in many fogs, but none like this one.  If the spirits of the dead should revisit us, they would whisper, I think, as the air whispered around me then.