““The journey they took up the Negro and into the Agarapi River was very different from the dreamy voyage Finn and Maia had made the week before. “Faster--can’t we go faster?” Miss Minton kept saying. When their supply of wood ran low, she jumped ashore, grasping the machete which Furo had left with the other tools, and slashed her way through the undergrowth as though she had been born with a knife in her hand. Everything she had forbidden her pupils to do, she did herself--thinking gloomy thoughts, going off into black daydreams. One minute she thought that Maia had died in the fire, and the child seen on the Arabella was an Indian girl to whom Finn had given a ride. The next minute she thought that it had been Maia, but that she had now drowned, or had reached the Xanti, who had killed her. “You couldn’t blame them if they’d turned savage,” she said, “the way some of the tribes have been treated.” “Yara was a very gentle soul,” said the professor. “Finn’s mother.” “That was then ,” said Miss Minton.””
