und
himself all at once asking himself the amazing question as to what her
relationship might be to Bateese. It occurred to him rather
unpleasantly that there had been something distinctly proprietary in
the way the half-breed had picked her up on the sand, and that Bateese
had shown no hesitation a little later in threatening to knock his head
off unless he stopped talking to her. He wondered if Bateese was a
Boulain.

The two or three minutes of excitement in the boiling waters of the
Holy Ghost had acted like medicine on Carrigan. It seemed to him that
something had given way in his head, relieving him of an oppression
that had been like an iron hoop drawn tightly about his skull. He did
not want Bateese to suspect this change in him, and he slouched lower
against the dunnage-pack with his eyes still on the girl. He was
finding it increasingly difficult to keep from looking at her. She had
resumed her paddling, and Bateese was putting mighty efforts in his
strokes now, so that the narrow, birchbark canoe shot like an arrow
with the down-sweeping current of the river. A few hundred yards below
was a twist in the channel, and as the canoe rounded this, taking the
shoreward curve with dizzying swiftness, a wide, still straight-water
lay ahead. And far down this Carrigan saw the glow of fires.

The forest had drawn back from the river, leaving in its place a broken
tundra of rock and shale and a wide strip of black sand along the edge
of the stream itself. Carrigan knew what it was--an upheaval of the
tar-sand country so common still farther north, the beginning of that
treasure of the earth which would some day make the top of the American
continent one of the Eldorados of the world. The fires drew nearer, and
suddenly the still night was broken by the wild chanting of men. David
heard behind him a choking note in the throat of Bateese. A soft word
came from the lips of the girl, and it seemed to Carrigan that her head
was held higher in the moon glow. The chant increased in volume, a
rhythmic, throbbing, savage music that for a hundred and fifty years
had come from the throats of men along the Three Rivers. It thrilled
Carrigan as they bore down upon it. It was not song as civilization
would have counted song. It was like an explosion, an exultation of
human voice unchained, ebullient with the love of life, savage in its
good-humor. It was LE GAITE DE COEUR of the rivermen, who thought and
sang as their forefathers d