eady all opportunity for the girl to swim to shore
was irremediably past. While he could still control the canoe with
comparative ease, the river was a swift-moving sheet of water that would
carry any one but the strongest swimmer remorselessly into the rapids
below. Ben smiled, like a man who has come into a great happiness, and
rested on his paddle.

"Push into shore," the girl urged. "The home shore--if you can. Then
I'll go and find him and try to quiet him. He'll kill you if you don't."

A short pause followed the girl's words. The man smiled coldly into her
eyes.

"He'll kill me, will he?" he repeated.

The response to the simple question was simply unmitigated terror, swift
and deadly, surging through the girl's frame. It caught and twisted her
throat muscles like a cruel hand; and her childish eyes widened and
darkened under his contemptuous gaze.

"What do you mean?" she asked breathlessly. "What--are you going to do?"

"He won't kill me," Ben went on. "I may kill him--and I will if I
can--but he won't kill me. See--we're going faster all the time."

It was true. Strokes of the paddle were no longer necessary to propel
the craft at the breakneck pace. It sped like an arrow--straight toward
the perilous cataracts below.

The girl watched him with transcending horror, and slowly the truth went
home. The supplies in the boat, her father's desperate attempt to rescue
her, even at the risk of her own life and the cost of Ben's, this white,
exultant face before her, more terrible than that of the wolf between,
the cold reptile eyes so full of some unhallowed emotion,--at last she
saw their meaning and relation. Was it _death_--was _that_ what this mad
man in the stern had for her? She remembered what she had told him the
day before, her description of the cataracts that lay below. She
struggled to shake off the trance that her terror had cast about her.

"Turn into the shore," she told him, half-whispering. There was no
pleading in her tone: the hard eyes before her told her only too plainly
how futile her pleas would be. "You still have time to steer into shore.
I'll jump overboard if you don't."

He shook his head. "Don't jump overboard, Beatrice," he answered, some
of the harshness gone from his tones. "It isn't my purpose to kill
you--and to jump over into this stream only means to die--'for any one
except the most powerful swimmer. You'd be carried down in an instant."

The girl knew he spoke the tru