oughten ter look like that!"

The man threw up his head, and laughed,--laughed as the wild, reckless
and lost Brian Kent had laughed that black night when, in the drifting
boat, he had cursed the life he was leaving and had drunk his profane
toast to the darkness into which he was being carried.

Raising the manuscript, which represented all that the past months of
his re-created life had meant to him, and grasping it in both hands, he
shook it contemptuously, as he said, with indescribable bitterness and
the reckless surrendering of every hope: "'All them fine things that I
have wrote down for everybody ter read.'" He mimicked her voice with a
sneer, and laughed again. Then: "It's all a lie, Judy, dear;--a damned
lie. Auntie Sue is a saint, and believes it. She made me believe it
for a little while,--her beautiful, impossible dream-philosophy of the
river. The river,--hell!--the river is as treacherous and cruel and
false and tricky and crooked as life itself! And I am as warped and
twisted in mind and soul as you are in body, Judy, dear. Neither of us
can help it. We were made that way by the river. To hell with the whole
impossible mess of things!" With a gesture of violent rage, he turned
toward the river, and, taking a step forward, lifted the manuscript high
above his head.

Judy screamed, "Mr. Burns, don't!"

He paused an instant, and, turning his head, looked at her with another
laugh.

"'Fore God, you dassn't do that!" she implored.

And then, as the man turned his face from her, and his arms went back
above his head for the swing that would send the manuscript far out into
the tumbling waters of the rapids, she leaped toward him, and, catching
his arm, hampered his movement so that the book fell a few feet from the
shore, where the water, checked a little in its onward rush to the cliff
by the irregular bank, boiled and eddied among the rocky ledges and huge
boulders that retarded its force. Another leap carried the mountain girl
to the edge of the bank, where she crouched like a runner ready for
the report of the starter's pistol, her black, beady eyes searching the
stream for the volume of manuscript, which had disappeared from sight,
drawn down by the troubled swirling currents.

The man, watching her, laughed in derision; but, while his mocking
laughter was still on his lips, the boiling currents brought the book,
again, to the surface, and Brian saw the girl leave the bank as if
thrown by a powe