olding like grim death. As for me,
I'd never reckoned that even a madman would try to swim the Fraser in
clothes and boots.

"I can't bear it!" she cried, turning her face away. "Tell me--"

"I guess," said I, feeling mighty grave, "you're due to become a widow."

The rapids got Trevor, and I watched.

"You are a widow," says I, at last.

She fainted.

There, I'm dead sick of writing this letter, and my wrist is all
toothache.

JESSE.

CHAPTER III

LOVE

_Kate's Narrative_

Jesse argues that there's nothing to boast of in the way he saved me.
Horse and rifle are like feet to run with, hands to fight with, part of
his life. "Now, if I'd rode a giraffe and harpooned you, I'd have my
name in all the papers. Shucks! Skill and courage are things to shame
the man who hasn't got them."

I married Lionel Trevor in the days when he looked like a god as
Parsifal, sang like an angel, had Europe at his feet. "Something wrong
with Europe," is Jesse's comment. "West of the Rockies we don't use
such, except to sell their skins."

When Lionel lost his voice--more to him than are horse and gun to
Jesse--he would not ask me to follow him into the wilderness but tried
to persuade me to stay on in London. I was singing "Eurydice" in
_Orfeo_, my feet, thanks to Lionel, were at last on the great ladder,
and if I was ambitious, who shall blame me? Yet for better, for worse,
we were married, and here among the pines, in this celestial air, a year
or two at the most would give him back his voice. My place was at his
side, for better or worse, and when he drank, when day by day I watched
the light of reason give place in his eyes to bestial vice, until at
last I found myself chained to a maniac--till death us do part--it was
then I first saw Jesse, the one man whose eyes showed understanding.

I can't write about that day when Lionel, a thing possessed of devils,
hunted me through the woods like a bear. It wasn't fair. I'm only
twenty-eight years old. It wasn't fair that I should be treated like
that. I doubt if I remember all that happened. I must have been crazed
with pain and fear until suddenly I woke up on a boulder by that awful
river, and saw him drift past me, caught in the rapids, drowning. I
would have shouted I was so glad, until he saw me, and dying as he was,
looked at me with Lionel's clear sane eyes.

I fainted, and when I awoke again in the dusk, Jesse bent over me, not
as he is, the rugged fighti