Page:Raymond Spears--Diamond Tolls.djvu/44

 and nearer, after holding aloof all day long—Delia realized that her hour of trial was at hand.

"I knew it!" she whispered to herself, "I expected this. Now I mustn't flinch!"

A long, straight reach ran for miles down ahead of her. With her glasses she searched both shores, and saw only a scattered shantyboat or two. It was a wide, wild river, and wherever she ran in, she would be dependent upon her own resources. She could expect no help in that lonesome reach of woods and sandbars.

She dared not float in the night. There were terrors in midstream which she dreaded more than the questionable and gloomy bank. So she landed at the foot of a long, narrow sandbar, in a wide, almost currentless eddy. She made fast with her bow lines to the limbs of a snag that lay half in and half out of the water where her bow bumped against them.

She prepared supper, though she felt that she never would be able to eat another meal in the coming of night. As she cooked, the gasolene cruiser swung by under power, cut across into the eddy below her, and then floated up toward her boat in the slow eddy current.

In the pit sat a man whom she could see plainly now. He was busied getting his own supper in the galley on a gasolene stove. She watched him from