nd caromed off into
mid-stream again. Down all its length the stiff waves stood in serried
rows, and its crevices and water-worn caverns were a-bellow with unseen
strife.

"Now! Bend to it! Your best!"

It was the last order Corliss could give, for in the din they were
about to enter a man's voice were like a cricket's chirp amid the
growling of an earthquake. La Bijou sprang forward, cleared the eddy
with a bound, and plunged into the thick. _Dip and lift, dip and
lift_, the paddles worked with rhythmic strength. The water rippled
and tore, and pulled all ways at once; and the fragile shell, unable to
go all ways at once, shook and quivered with the shock of resistance.
It veered nervously to the right and left, but Frona held it with a
hand of steel. A yard away a fissure in the rock grinned at them. La
Bijou leaped and shot ahead, and the water, slipping away underneath,
kept her always in one place. Now they surged out from the fissure,
now in; ahead for half a yard, then back again; and the fissure mocked
their toil.

Five minutes, each of which sounded a separate eternity, and the
fissure was past. Ten minutes, and it was a hundred feet astern. _Dip
and lift, dip and lift_, till sky and earth and river were blotted out,
and consciousness dwindled to a thin line,--a streak of foam, fringed
on the one hand with sneering rock, on the other with snarling water.
That thin line summed up all. Somewhere below was the beginning of
things; somewhere above, beyond the roar and traffic, was the end of
things; and for that end they strove.

And still Frona held the egg-shell with a hand of steel. What they
gained they held, and fought for more, inch by inch, _dip and lift_;
and all would have been well but for the flutter of Tommy's soul. A
cake of ice, sucked beneath by the current, rose under his paddle with
a flurry of foam, turned over its toothed edge, and was dragged back
into the depths. And in that sight he saw himself, hair streaming
upward and drowned hands clutching emptiness, going feet first, down
and down. He stared, wide-eyed, at the portent, and his poised paddle
refused to strike. On the instant the fissure grinned in their faces,
and the next they were below the bluffs, drifting gently in the eddy.

Frona lay, head thrown back, sobbing at the sun; amidships Corliss
sprawled panting; and forward, choking and gasping and nerveless, the
Scotsman drooped his head upon his knees. La Bijou