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Page 112

| had no choice but to take a swim. She could not bear to live with the itch of the fleas another minute! |

| But she would choose an isolated spot so that she could bathe in private. |

| She watched in which direction the men were going, then moved quickly in the opposite direction along the riverbank. After only a short distance she began to feel that she was perhaps a little too alone, and stopped. In case some animal decided to taste her for its supper, she did not want to go beyond screaming range of the men. |

| Yet she thought she had found a private enough cove away from the searching eyes of the men and felt it was safe enough for her to remove her clothes so that she could give her body a good dousing in the water. Even so, she feared that she might be scratching for the next year because of the bites already inflicted on her flesh! |

| First she slipped her boots off, then her shirt and breeches. The boots were laid aside. She carried her clothes into the water with her, steadying herself on the rocky bottom. Moving out into the current, she stopped when she was waist-deep in the river and began furiously scrubbing her clothes together in the water. |

| As she labored to rid the clothes of their infestation, she looked guardedly around her, then relaxed when she realized that she was still very much alone. It was a place of total serenity. The current of the river was slow; the warm, brown water seemed to stand still as it murmured and meandered through intermittent deep pools and gravel-filled shallows. It seemed a secret place. There in the deep shade, enclosed in the dense, overhanging growth of |

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