r. He had watched it with eyes that could
never forget. His mind, exquisitely alive, with the sensibility of a
plexus of racked and broken nerves, had taken up every line, every
channel and stone and rapid of that flood, and had engraved them in
ineffaceable characters. With the unintelligible vagary of thought,
while his breast seemed crushed, his heart broken, he had imagined
himself adrift on that surging river, and he had planned his escape
through the rapids.

As Lane stood on the ledge, knee-deep in the water, with the certainty
that he had a perfect photograph of the field of tumbling waters below
in his mind's eye, a strange voice seemed to whisper in his ear.

_"This is your great trial!"_

Without further hesitation he shoved the boat off the ledge.

Round and round the back eddy he floated. At the outlet on the
down-stream side, where the gleaming line of foam marked the escape of
water into the on-rushing current, he whirled his boat, stern ahead.
Down he shot with a plunge and then up with a rise. Racing on over
the uneven swells he felt the hissing spray, and the malignant tips of
the waves that broke their fury on the boat and expended it in a
shower of stinging drops. The wind cut his face. He rode a sea of
foam, then turgid rolling mounds of water that heaved him up and up,
and down long planes that laughed with hollow boom, then into channels
of smooth current, where the torrent wreathed the black stones in
yellowish white.

Lane saw the golden sun, the blue sky, the fleecy clouds, the red and
purple of the colored hills; and felt his chest expand with the
mounting glory of great effort. The muscles of his back and arms,
strengthened by the long toil with his heavy axe, rippled and swelled
and burned, and stretched like rubber cords, and strung tight like
steel bands. The boat was a toy.

He rodes the waves, and threaded a labyrinth of ugly stones, and shot
an unobstructed channel, and evaded a menacing drift. The current
carried him irresistibly onward. When his keen eye caught danger ahead
he sunk the oars deep and pulled back. A powerful stroke made the boat
pause, another turned her bow to the right or left, then the swift
water hitting her obliquely sheered her in the safe direction. So Lane
kept afloat through the spray that smelled fresh and dank, through the
crash and surge and roar and boom, through the boiling caldron.

The descent quickened. On! On! he was borne with increasing veloc