, pointing into the sleek
stream sliding by.

A great cake had driven its nose into the bed of the river thirty feet
below and was struggling to up-end. All the frigid flood behind
crinkled and bent back like so much paper. Then the stalled cake
turned completely over and thrust its muddy nose skyward. But the
squeeze caught it, while cake mounted cake at its back, and its fifty
feet of muck and gouge were hurled into the air. It crashed upon the
moving mass beneath, and flying fragments landed at the feet of those
that watched. Caught broadside in a chaos of pressures, it crumbled
into scattered pieces and disappeared.

"God!" The baron spoke the word reverently and with awe.

Frona caught his hand on the one side and her father's on the other.
The ice was now leaping past in feverish haste. Somewhere below a
heavy cake butted into the bank, and the ground swayed under their
feet. Another followed it, nearer the surface, and as they sprang
back, upreared mightily, and, with a ton or so of soil on its broad
back, bowled insolently onward. And yet another, reaching inshore like
a huge hand, ripped three careless pines out by the roots and bore them
away.

Day had broken, and the driving white gorged the Yukon from shore to
shore. What of the pressure of pent water behind, the speed of the
flood had become dizzying. Down all its length the bank was being
gashed and gouged, and the island was jarring and shaking to its
foundations.

"Oh, great! Great!" Frona sprang up and down between the men. "Where
is your fake, baron?"

"Ah!" He shook his head. "Ah! I was wrong. I am miserable. But the
magnificence! Look!"

He pointed down to the bunch of islands which obstructed the bend.
There the mile-wide stream divided and subdivided again,--which was
well for water, but not so well for packed ice. The islands drove
their wedged heads into the frozen flood and tossed the cakes high into
the air. But cake pressed upon cake and shelved out of the water, out
and up, sliding and grinding and climbing, and still more cakes from
behind, till hillocks and mountains of ice upreared and crashed among
the trees.

"A likely place for a jam," Jacob Welse said. "Get the glasses,
Frona." He gazed through them long and steadily. "It's growing,
spreading out. A cake at the right time and the right place . . ."

"But the river is falling!" Frona cried.

The ice had dropped six feet below the top of the bank, a