reached the bank.

With a sob, Betty Jo followed as fast as she could.

As Brian Kent raced toward the river's edge, the powerful current drew
the boat with the woman into the first rough water of the rapids, and,
as the skiff was shaken and tossed by the force that was sweeping it
with ever-increasing speed toward the wild turmoil at Elbow Rock, the
woman screamed again and again for help.

The warring forces of the stream whirled the little craft about, and
she saw the man who was nearing the bank. She rose to her feet in the
rocking boat, and stretched out her arms,--calling his name, "Brian!
Brian! Brian!" Then the impact of the boat against a larger wave of
the rapids brought her to her knees, and she clung to the thwarts with
piteous cries.

Betty Jo and the clubhouse men, who had overtaken her, saw Brian as
he reached the river opposite the boat. For a little way he raced the
tumbling waters until he had gained a short distance ahead of the skiff;
then they saw him, without an instant's pause, leap from the high bank
far out into the boiling stream.

Running along the bank, the helpless watchers saw the man fighting his
way toward the boat. One moment, he disappeared from sight, dragged
beneath the surface by the powerful currents with which he wrestled. The
next instant, the boiling waters would toss him high on the crest of a
rolling wave, only to drag him down again a second later. But, always,
he drew nearer and nearer the object of his struggle, while the rapids
swept both the helpless woman and the tossing boat and the swimming man
onward toward the towering cliff, and the thunder-roar of the mad waters
below grew louder and louder.

The splendid strength of arms and shoulders which Brian Kent had
acquired by his months of work with his ax on the timbered mountain-side
sustained him now in his need. With tremendous energy, he breasted the
might of the furious river. To the watchers it seemed at times that it
was beyond the power of human muscles to endure the terrific strain.
Then he gained the boat, and they saw him striving with desperate energy
to drag it toward the opposite shore and so into the currents that would
carry it past the menacing point of the cliff and perhaps to the safety
of the quiet water below.

All that human strength could do in that terrible situation, Brian Kent
did. But the task was beyond the power of mortal man.

For an instant the breathless watchers on the bank thought