ware that in the future they would be
tested together in the fire of wild adventure. Every man is more or
less a prophet at certain points in his life.

Twilight and moonlight were blending softly when Beverley, on his way
back to the fort, departing from a direct course, went along the
river's side southward to have a few moments of reflective strolling
within reach of the water's pleasant murmur and the town's indefinite
evening stir. Rich sweetness, the gift of early autumn, was on the air
blowing softly out of a lilac west and singing in the willow fringe
that hung here and there over the bank.

On the farther side of the river's wide flow, swollen by recent heavy
rains, Beverley saw a pirogue, in one end of which a dark figure swayed
to the strokes of a paddle. The slender and shallow little craft was
bobbing on the choppy waves and taking a zig-zag course among floating
logs and masses of lighter driftwood, while making slow but certain
headway toward the hither bank.

Beverley took a bit of punk and a flint and steel from his pocket,
relit his pipe and stood watching the skilful boatman conduct his
somewhat dangerous voyage diagonally against the rolling current. It
was a shifting, hide-and-seek scene, its features appearing and
disappearing with the action of the waves and the doubtful light
reflected from fading clouds and sky. Now and again the man stood up in
his skittish pirogue, balancing himself with care, to use a short pole
in shoving driftwood out of his way; and more than once he looked to
Beverley as if he had plunged head-long into the dark water.

The spot, as nearly as it can be fixed, was about two hundred yards
below where the public road-bridge at present spans the Wabash. The
bluff was then far different from what it is now, steeper and higher,
with less silt and sand between it and the water's edge. Indeed,
swollen as the current was, a man could stand on the top of the bank
and easily leap into the deep water. At a point near the middle of the
river a great mass of drift-logs and sand had long ago formed a barrier
which split the stream so that one current came heavily shoreward on
the side next the town and swashed with its muddy foam, making a swirl
and eddy just below where Beverley stood.

The pirogue rounded the upper angle of this obstruction, not without
difficulty to its crew of one, and swung into the rapid shoreward rush,
as was evidently planned for by the steersman, who now p