by the roar it met, balanced itself fore-and-aft
for one swift instant and plunged with a swoop that caught away the
breath.

The bows shot under the white water below the fall, lifted to the
first wave, knocking up foam out of foam, and so dived to the next,
quivering like a reed shaken in the hand. Dominique straightened
himself on his knees. In a moment he was working his paddle like a
madman, striking broad off with it on this side and that, forcing the
canoe into its course, zigzagging within a hand's breadth of rocks
which, at a touch, would have broken her like glass, and across the
edge of whirlpools waiting to drown a man and chase his body round
for hours within a few inches of the surface; and all at a speed of
fifteen to eighteen miles an hour, with never an instant's pause
between sight and stroke. The Indian in the stern took his cue from
Dominique; now paddling for dear life, now flinging his body back as
with a turn of the wrist he checked the steerage.

The priest sat with a white drenched face; a brave man terrified.
He felt the floor of the world collapsing, saw its forests reeling by
in the spray. It cracked like a bubble and was dissolved in
rainbows--wisps caught in the rocks and fluttering in the wind of the
boat's flight. Then, as the pressure on heart and chest grew
intolerable, the speed began to slacken and he drew a shuddering
breath; but his brain still kept the whirl of the wild minutes past
and his hand scarcely relaxed its grip on the gunwale. As a runaway
horse, still galloping, drops back to control, so the canoe seemed to
find her senses and leapt at the waves with a cunning change of
motion, no longer shearing through their crests, but riding them with
a long and easy swoop. Still Father Launoy did not speak. He sat as
one for whom a door has been held half-open, and closed again, upon a
vision.

Yet when he found his tongue--which was not until they reached the
end of the white water, and Dominique, after panting a while, headed
the canoe for shore--his voice did not shake.

"It was a bold thought of these men, or a foolhardy, to strike across
the Wilderness," he said meditatively, in the tone of one picking up
a talk which chance has interrupted.

"There are many ways through those woods," Dominique answered.
"Between here and Fort Niagara you may hear tell of a dozen perhaps;
and the Iroquois have their own."

"Let us hope that none of theirs crosses the one you an