s glory of the northern light. Youth
and vigor, he told himself, must always exist under those unpolluted
lights of the upper worlds, the unspeaking things which had told him
more than he had ever learned from the mouths of other men. They stood
for his religion, his faith, his belief in the existence of things
greater than the insignificant spark which animated his own body. He
appreciated them most when there was stillness. And tonight it was
still. It was so quiet that the trickling of the paddles was like
subdued music. From the forest there came no sound. Yet he knew there
was life there, wide-eyed, questing life, life that moved on velvety
wing and padded foot, just as he and Marie-Anne and the half-breed
Bateese were moving in the canoe. To have called out in this hour would
have taken an effort, for a supreme and invisible Hand seemed to have
commanded stillness upon the earth.

And then there came droning upon his ears a break in the stillness, and
as he listened, the shores closed slowly in, narrowing the channel
until he saw giant masses of gray rock replacing the thick verdure of
balsam, spruce, and cedar. The moaning grew louder, and the rocks
climbed skyward until they hung in great cliffs. There could be but one
meaning to this sudden change. They were close to LE SAINT-ESPRIT
RAPIDE--the Holy Ghost Rapids. Carrigan was astonished. That day at
noon he had believed the Holy Ghost to be twenty or thirty miles below
him. Now they were at its mouth, and he saw that Bateese and Jeanne
Marie-Anne Boulain were quietly and unexcitedly preparing to run that
vicious stretch of water. Unconsciously he gripped the gunwales of the
canoe with both hands as the sound of the rapids grew into low and
sullen thunder. In the moonlight ahead he could see the rock walls
closing in until the channel was crushed between two precipitous
ramparts, and the moon and stars, sending their glow between those
walls, lighted up a frothing path of water that made Carrigan hold his
breath. He would have portaged this place even in broad day.

He looked at the girl in the bow. The slender figure Was a little more
erect, the glowing head held a little higher. In those moments he would
have liked to see her face, the wonderful something that must be in her
eyes as she rode fearlessly into the teeth of the menace ahead. For he
could see that she was not afraid, that she was facing this thing with
a sort of exultation, that there was somethin