Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 1 (1926-07).djvu/28

 A SERIAL NOVEL by Greye La Spina



T HAD been a glorious day, and a glorious trip. Bessie Gillespie, dipping paddle into her side of the well-loaded canoe, sighed such a sigh of repletion and contentment that her twin brother chuckled softly behind her.

“Think you’re going to like it, Bess?” he inquired, his gray eyes darting this way and that, as the canoe made upstream slowly.

“Oh, Ewan, it’s wonderful!” she breathed, tossing back her bobbed brown head to inhale the sweet fragrance of the summer woods.

“You’re dead right, it’s wonderful,” the young man agreed. “I ought to make some ripsnorting canvases in this kind of primeval atmosphere. Jove, Bessie, but the virgin forest is magnificent!”

The girl drew in her breath contentedly, but her paddle hesitated a moment over the sluggishly moving stream that flowed darkly past the sides of the canoe in the shadow of the trees, letting sparkling drops flash in the occasional beams of light from the setting sun, as it shone here and there through thickly interlaced branches.

“The woods are getting thicker, aren’t they? Do you think we’ll be able to find the cabin before dark?” she asked, a bit nervously, as her hazel eyes turned from one darkling shore to the other. “It would be rather—oh, do you know, I’d somehow hate to be out hero in the open after dark,” she admitted, laughing just a bit shamefacedly. 27