y
fighting beyond the limit. Say, she's born to troubles and worries all
the time. And she mostly gets through all the time. Why? Grit! She
doesn't just care a darn. She's going to get through--and she does. Say,
let's get along down and leave that wall-eyed old figurehead keeping
guard. Come on."

CHAPTER IX

THE CLOSE OF THE SEASON

For days the journey continued through the ever deepening gorge. The
stern grey walls remained unbroken, except for occasional sentry trees
which had survived the years of storm and flood. Carpets of Arctic
lichen sometimes clothed their nakedness, and even wide wastes of
noisome fungus. But these things had no power to depress Marcel and
Keeko; the Indians, too, passed them all unheeded. They were concerned
alone with the perils of the waters which were often almost
overwhelming.

The journey northward was one continuous struggle by day, and the daylit
night was passed in the profound slumbers of exhausted bodies, with the
canoes beached on some low foreshore dank with an atmosphere of hideous
decay.

For Keeko and the Indians it seemed as if the land was rising ever
higher and higher, and the endless waterway was cutting its course
deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth. But there was no
question. Marcel was piloting them to a hunting ground of his own, and
this passage was the highway to it.

Only once did Keeko protest. It was a protest that was natural enough.
But Marcel swept it aside without scruple.

"I call this 'Hell's Gate,'" he said, with a ready laugh. "Sounds
rotten? But I always figger you need to pass through 'some' hell to make
Paradise. We're in a mighty big country, and a-top of us are hundreds,
and maybe thousands, of miles of forests that never heard tell of man.
Wait. There's a break soon, just beyond the big rapids. That's where
these darn old walls of rock fade right out, and make way for a lake
that's like a sea."

It was his undisturbed confidence that broke the constant threat of
imagination. This north country was Marcel's home. He knew no other. So
they drove on, and on, to the goal that he had set.

The great rapids came at them as he had promised. And, in turn, they
were passed on that narrow margin which is the line drawn between safety
and destruction. Then came the mouth of the gorge, and the stretch of
open river where it debouched upon the "lake that was like a sea."

For Keeko it was all like some wonderful dream with Marce