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For five hours they paddled, then the last bend in the river and St. Marys lay three miles ahead. Naqua, in the bow, reached up a withered hand, caught at an overhanging branch and their old eyes took in a scene familiar but yet strange. The sky line had changed, and up where the big white water crossed the river like a flat bar there was cause for wonderment.
"Hungry?" asked Clark presently. The old chief did not reply, being too moved by strange thoughts and the rush of memory to feel anything else, but Naqua lifted a withered head in the bow. "Much hungry," she croaked shrilly. Clark laughed and signaled to the blockhouse, where the Japanese cook waited, peering from a window. Presently the latter came out carrying a tray.
"How," he grunted. The canoe slid delicately forward till presently it floated in the tiny lock. Naqua said nothing, being seized by an enormous fear that clutched at her stringly throat and held her silent, but Shingwauk felt something stirring in his breast. Here, surrounded by the confused vibrations of the works, he resigned himself to ancient memories.
He looked at his own hands they were knotted and wrinkled; he scanned the twelve-foot canoe it seemed small and hastily built of poor bark; he stared at the back of Naqua and reflected how bent and rounded it was instead of being straight and strong and supple; he glanced up and where once there stretched green bush and small running streams now stood things bigger than he had ever seen; he sniffed at the wind and, without knowing what it was, caught the sharp odor of metal and machinery.
Presently Shingwauk tapped the thwart with the haft of his paddle and they glided on, past the lower end of the town with its new houses and gardens, past a street car that moved like a noisy miracle with nothing to pull it, being evidently animated by some devil enchained, past Filmer's dock where years before Shingwauk and Naqua used to bring mink and otter and marten for trade; past other docks newer and larger and a town bigger than anything they had ever conceived, and opposite which sharp-nosed devil boats darted about or swung at anchor, across the deep bay that lay between the town and the big white water, till finally they floated near the block-house and Shingwauk's eyes, gazing profoundly at the massive proportions of Clark's buildings, caught the narrow stone lined entrance to the little Hudson Bay canal.
He waited till Naqua finished such a meal as she had never seen before, his face gaunt but his eyes large and profound with the shadow of unspeakable thoughts. Presently he dipped his blade in the untroubled water, and the canoe backed out of the lock. "Boozhoo!" he said slowly, with one long look at Clark. "Good-by! Come again."
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