rmuring in her ear, and always the refrain was, "Down the stream to
Carillon! Shoot the Rapids of Carillon!"

Why? How should she know? Wherefore should she know? This was of the
things beyond the why of the human mind. Sometimes all our lives, if we
keep our souls young, and see the world as we first saw it with eyes and
heart unsoiled, we hear the murmuring of the Other Self, that Self
from which we separated when we entered this mortal sphere, but which
followed us, invisible yet whispering inspiration to us. But sometimes
we only hear It, our own soul's oracle, while yet our years are few,
and we have not passed that frontier between innocence and experience,
reality and pretence. Pretence it is which drives the Other Self away
with wailing on its lips. Then we hear It cry in the night when, because
of the trouble of life, we cannot sleep; or at the play when we are
caught away from ourselves into another air than ours; when music pours
around us like a soft wind from a garden of pomegranates; or when a
child asks a question which brings us back to the land where everything
is so true that it can be shouted from the tree-tops.

Why was Fleda Druse tempting death in the Carillon Rapids?

She had heard a whisper as she wandered among the pine-trees there at
Manitou, and it said simply the one word, "Now!" She knew that she must
do it; she had driven her canoe out into the resistless current to ride
the Rapids of Carillon. Her Other Self had whispered to her.

Yonder, thousands of miles away in Syria, there were the Hills of
Lebanon; and there was one phrase which made every Syrian heart beat
faster, if he were on the march. It was, "The Druses are up!" When
that wild tribe took to the saddle to war upon the Caravans and against
authority, from Lebanon to Palmyra, from Jerusalem to Damascus men
looked anxiously about them and rode hard to refuge.

And here also in the Far North where the River Sagalac ran a wild race
to Carillon, leaving behind the new towns of Lebanon and Manitou, "the
Druses were up."

The daughter of Gabriel Druse, the giant, was riding the Rapids of the
Sagalac. The suspense to her and to those who watched her course--to
Tekewani and his braves, to Osterhaut and Jowett--could not be long. It
was a matter of minutes only, in which every second was a miracle and
might be a catastrophe.

From rock to rock, from wild white water to wild white water she sped,
now tossing to death as it seemed, no