as well as I do!" he sneered with scorn in his voice, and a sort of
resignation. "The best thing you can do is to keep quiet and try to hold
your mind as firm as possible. This feeble attempt at self-deception
only makes the truth harder when you're forced to meet it."

My little effort was over, and I found nothing more to say, for I knew
quite well his words were true, and that I was the fool, not _he_. Up to
a certain stage in the adventure he kept ahead of me easily, and I think
I felt annoyed to be out of it, to be thus proved less psychic, less
sensitive than himself to these extraordinary happenings, and half
ignorant all the time of what was going on under my very nose. _He knew_
from the very beginning, apparently. But at the moment I wholly missed
the point of his words about the necessity of there being a victim, and
that we ourselves were destined to satisfy the want. I dropped all
pretense thenceforward, but thenceforward likewise my fear increased
steadily to the climax.

"But you're quite right about one thing," he added, before the subject
passed, "and that is that we're wiser not to talk about it, or even to
think about it, because what one _thinks_ finds expression in words, and
what one _says_, happens."

That afternoon, while the canoe dried and hardened, we spent trying to
fish, testing the leak, collecting wood, and watching the enormous flood
of rising water. Masses of driftwood swept near our shores sometimes,
and we fished for them with long willow branches. The island grew
perceptibly smaller as the banks were torn away with great gulps and
splashes. The weather kept brilliantly fine till about four o'clock, and
then for the first time for three days the wind showed signs of abating.
Clouds began to gather in the southwest, spreading thence slowly over
the sky.

This lessening of the wind came as a great relief, for the incessant
roaring, banging, and thundering had irritated our nerves. Yet the
silence that came about five o'clock with its sudden cessation was in a
manner quite as oppressive. The booming of the river had everything its
own way then: it filled the air with deep murmurs, more musical than the
wind noises, but infinitely more monotonous. The wind held many notes,
rising, falling, always beating out some sort of great elemental tune;
whereas the river's song lay between three notes at most--dull pedal
notes, that held a lugubrious quality foreign to the wind, and somehow
seem