rington across in the canoe. The river ran high that morning,
and he felt dubious about the ford, because several pack-horses had
already been drowned there.

The first intimation he had of anything wrong was a cry from the girl, and
he saw a strip of water widen between the canoe and the bank. He ran his
hardest, but made little headway, for thorny bushes and fern formed
thickets along the bank, while when he reached the boulders he felt that
he had come too late, because no swimmer could then overtake the canoe,
even if he escaped destruction in the first rapid immediately below.
Nevertheless, after a glance at the drawn face of the girl, which haunted
him long afterward, as with the first shock of terror on her she labored
helplessly at the paddle, he would even have made the hopeless attempt but
that Colonel Carrington, who of all the trio had retained his common
sense, intervened. It was not without reason that the Colonel had earned
the reputation of being a hard man.

"Come back! Stop him! Geoffrey, are you mad?" he roared; and Lawrence, who
had now recovered his wits, flung himself upon a man who, stripping
himself to the waist as he ran, floundered at breakneck speed among the
boulders. They went down together heavily, and the next moment the runner
had him by the throat, hissing through his teeth, "Let go, you fool,
before I murder you!"

Lawrence was strong, however, and held fast half-choked for a moment or
two, until the Colonel's cry reached them again:

"Get up, Geoffrey, you lunatic! Follow, and head them off along the
bank!"

The shouts and the confusion had startled his restive horse, and by the
time he had mounted the pair were on their feet again stumbling over the
boulders or smashing through the undergrowth in a desperate race, with the
horse blundering behind them and the canoe ahead. They might possibly have
overtaken it except for the rapid, Lawrence said, but it swept like a
toboggan down that seething rush, and, as realizing that it was almost
hopeless, they held on, there was a clatter on the opposite slope, and
they saw me break out at headlong gallop from the woods. They halted when
I crawled into the canoe, for we were beyond all human help from that bank
now; and, flinging himself from the saddle, Colonel Carrington stood with
clenched hands and quivering lips, staring after us, so Lawrence said, out
of awful eyes.

"Bravo!" he gasped at length. "He'll reach the gravel-spit. Another