She pointed to a yucca in full, creamy flower; a creature of unearthly purity in the glow of the moon, a dream-maiden beckoning at the gates of darkness to a world of hidden and ineffable beauty.

“When I saw my first yucca in blossom,” said Banneker, “it was just before sunrise after I had been riding all night, and I came on it around a dip in the hills, standing alone against a sky of pearl and silver.  It made me think of a ghost, the ghost of a girl who had died too young to know womanhood, died while she was asleep and dreaming pale, soft dreams, never to be fulfilled.”

“That’s the injustice of death,” she answered.  “To take one before one knows and has felt and been all that there is to know and feel and be.”

“Yet”—­he turned a slow smile to her—­“you were just now calling Experience bad names; a horrid hag, wasn’t it?”

“At least, she’s life,” retorted the girl.

“Yes.  She’s life.”

“Ban, I want to go on.  The whole universe is in motion.  Why must we stand still?”

They reembarked.  The grip of the hurrying depths took them past crinkly water, lustrously bronze in the moonlight where the bank had given way, and presently delivered them, around the shoulder of a low, brush-crowned bluff, into the keeping of a swollen creek.  Here the going was more tricky.  There were shoals and whirls at the bends, and plunging flotsam to be avoided.  Banneker handled the boat with masterly address, easing her through the swift passages, keeping her, with a touch here and a dip there, to the deepest flow, swerving adroitly to dodge the trees and brush which might have punctured the thin metal.  Once he cried out and lunged at some object with an unshipped oar.  It rolled and sank, but not before Io had caught the contour of a pasty face.  She was startled rather than horrified at this apparition of death.  It seemed an accessory proper to the pattern of the bewitched night.

Through a little, silvered surf of cross-waves, they were shot, after an hour of this uneasy going, into the broad, clean sweep of the Little Bowleg River.  After the troubled progress of the lesser current it seemed very quiet and secure; almost placid.  But the banks slipped by in an endless chain.  Presently they came abreast of three horsemen riding the river trail, who urged their horses into a gallop, keeping up with them for a mile or more.  As they fell away, Io waved a handkerchief at them, to which they made response by firing a salvo from their revolvers into the air.

“We’re making better than ten miles an hour,” Banneker called over his shoulder to his passenger.

They shot between the split halves of a little, scraggly, ramshackle town, danced in white water where the ford had been, and darted onward.  Now Banneker began to hold against the current, scanning the shores until, with a quick wrench, he brought the stern around and ran it up on a muddy bit of strand.