The river was at flood height and running with tremendous force. But for the aid of the current Adrian’s strength plying the oars would have made scant speed. It was only a short time before he sighted the little riverside shanty which no longer showed its stilts, but sat on the water as flush with the surface as a swimming duck. Adrian was able from his seat between the rowlocks to knock on the closed door without rising. There was no response for a few minutes, although the building was obviously inhabited, the sluggish smoke coiling up from the stove-pipe into this dull day of late winter or early spring, whichever season might be credited with its surly disaffection. A child’s voice within suddenly babbled forth, and but for this Adrian fancied a feint of absence might have been attempted. With a slight motion of the oars he kept the skiff in place at the entrance, and at length the door slowly opened and the frowsy, copper-tinted hair and freckled face of Jessy Jane was thrust forth. She was one of that type of woman to whom without any approach to moral delinquency a handsome man is always an object of supreme twittering interest, however remote of station and indifferent of temperament; however crusty or contemptuous. That he should obviously concern himself in no wise with her existence did not in any degree minimize the intensity of her personal absorption in him. Her face, sullen and lowering, took on a bland and mollifying expression, and with a fancied recognition of the rower she broke forth with a high, ecstatic chirp: “Why, Mr. Ran, I never knowed ’twas you hyar!” though she had never spoken to Randal Ducie, and knew him only by sight. “This is not Mr. Randal Ducie, but his brother,” said Adrian, and as she stared silently at him, noting the wonderful resemblance, he continued: “I want to speak to Joshua Berridge,” he consulted a paper in his hand. “He lives here, doesn’t he?” “My dad-in-law,” she explained, suavely; “but he ain’t at home just now, though”--with a facetious smile, “’twon’t be long ’fore he comes--most supper time, ye know. Won’t ye kem in an’ wait?” Ducie declined this invitation and sat meditatively eyeing the waste of waters, for the river was now at its full scope, barring inundation, and stretched in great majesty to a bank scarcely visible on the farther shore. “I ain’t sure, but what ye mought find him over on the old _Che’okee Rose_,” she said, speculatively, for Ducie was very comely and she had a special impulse to be polite to so worthy an object of courtesy.