Angels' Shoes and Other Stories

The Horado, huge, torpid vein of the back-country, after taking tribute of a thousand miles of jungle was suddenly released into the ocean, whose clear and fertile depths it stained with the earth’s rot and detritus. Where these two encountered there was war, of meeting and retreating waters; which only ceased when the slow pressure of the turning tide exactly balanced the slow outpouring of the vast stream. Then, for a little while, there was peace. In the midst of such a peace lay the barquentine, Dorotea Dixon, waiting for high-water on the bar.

She, the soiled little trader, was briefly an illusion, a dream, built of some substance of pearl-petal and rose-gold too lovely for a name. Grier said the wet deck looked so fragile, so irridescent, that he tapped it with his heel as he stood, for the assurance that he stood on something more solid than a very bubble of the foam. The crew were silent; for the most part gazing overside at the streaks of mud-brown coiling in the sapphire; for the scornful sea never entirely mingled with the current of the river. It was all glitteringly, insubstantially, clear and vivid and still you’d have thought, said Grier, that a great glass globe had been clapped down over everything. Islets of grass, logs, nameless jungle-drift the dark river brought down and left about them in that strange belt of no-man’s-water between the flood and the flood. In the very fulness of dawn it brought the dugout.

The dugout, along with the other drift, drew silently and very slowly towards them; touched at last on the port quarter with a distinct double knock. After a curious pause and hesitation, a man rose on the rail with a rope; there was a glint of faces along the rail as the others gazed at him. Grier warned: “Careful, Mac-Awe,” but less out of consideration for the dugout, he says, than for the spell of stillness they must break. His voice, or the voices of the triumphing tide, broke it; and it was amidst a commonplace clatter, on a commonplace deck, that they lifted and laid Brennan and the native girl.

The girl was all right; Brennan, the huge bull of a man, was in a bad way. He’d little on, Grier said, but a pair of burst canvas shoes much too small for him; his shirt he’d rigged as a sort of shelter for the girl. They carried them below and put them in a cabin, having first ascertained that the girl wore a brass ring on the third finger of her left hand; for the Old Man, as Grier said, was “uncommon correct.” Then, leaving them to the Old Man and his box of medicines, they went to the work of coaxing the Dorotea up stream. First, Grier took off the man’s shoes—cut them off in strips—for his feet were bruised to the bone.