he
conscious of shock and hurt. It gave him no physical pain. Yet he
sensed the growing dizziness in his head, an increasing lack of
strength in his arms and body.

They were halfway through the Chute when he shot against a rock with
terrific force. The contact tore Marette from him. He plunged for her,
missed his grip, and then saw her opposite him, clinging to the same
rock. The babiche rope had saved her. Fastened about her waist and tied
to his wrist, it still held them together--with the five feet of rock
between them.

Panting, their life half beaten out of them, their eyes met over that
rock. Now that he was out of the water, the blood began streaming from
Kent's arms and shoulders and face, but he smiled at her as a few
moments before she had smiled at him. Her eyes were filled with the
pain of his hurts. He nodded back in the direction from which they had
come.

"We're out of the worst of it," he tried to shout. "As soon as we've
got our wind, I will climb over the rock to you. It won't take us
longer than a couple of minutes, perhaps less, to make the quiet water
at the end of the channel."

She heard him and nodded her reply. He wanted to give her confidence.
And he had no intention of resting, for her position filled him with a
terror which he fought to hide. The babiche rope, not half as large
around as his little finger, had swung her to the downstream side of
the rock. It was the slender thread of buckskin and his own weight that
were holding her. If the buckskin should break--

He thanked God that it was the tough babiche that had been around his
pack. An inch at a time he began to draw himself up on the rock. The
undertow behind the rock had flung a mass of Marette's long hair toward
him, so that it was a foot or two nearer to him than her clinging
hands. He worked himself toward that, for he saw that he could reach it
more quickly than he could reach her. At the same time he had to keep
his end of the babiche taut. It was, from the beginning, an almost
superhuman task. The rock was slippery as oil. Twice his eyes shot
down-stream, with the thought that it might be better to cast himself
bodily into the water, and after that draw Marette to him by means of
the babiche. What he saw convinced him that such action would be fatal.
He must have Marette in his arms. If he lost her--even for a few
seconds--the life would be beaten from her body in that rock-strewn
maelstrom below.

And then, suddenly