runnels. And we were
running a swift race with a tumult of waves, mounting the swell, dipping,
rising buoyant, forward in bounds, with a roar of the nearing rapids, and
spray dashing athwart in drifts. M. Radisson braced back. The prow
lifted, shot into mid-air, touched water again, and went whirling through
the mill-race that boiled below a waterfall. Once the canoe aimed
straight as an arrow for rocks in mid-current. M. Radisson's steel-shod
pole flashed in the sun. There was a quick thrust, answered by
Godefroy's counter-stroke at the stern; and the canoe grazed past the
rocks not a hair's-breadth off.

"Sainte Anne ha' mercy!" mumbled Godefroy, baling water from the canoe as
we breasted a turn in the river to calmer currents, "Sainte Anne ha'
mercy! But the master'd run us over Niagara, if he had a mind."

"Or the River Styx, if 'twould gain his end," sharply added Radisson.

But he ordered our paddles athwart for snatched rest, while he himself
kept alert at the bow. With the rash presumption of youth, I offered to
take the bow that he might rest; but he threw his head back with a loud
laugh, more of scorn than mirth, and bade me nurse a wounded hand. On
the evening of the third day we came to the Habitation. Without
disembarking, M. de Radisson sent the soldiers on sentinel duty at the
river front up to the fort with warning to prepare for instant siege.

"'Twill put speed in the lazy rascals to finish the fort," he remarked;
and the canoe glided out to mid-current again for the far expanse of the
bay.

By this we were all so used to M. Radisson's doings, 'twould not have
surprised us when the craft shot out from river-mouth to open sea if he
had ordered us to circumnavigate the ocean on a chip.

He did what was nigh as venturesome.

A quick, unwarned swerve of his pole, which bare gave Godefroy time to
take the cue, and our prow went scouring across the scud of whipping
currents where two rivers and an ocean-tide met. The seething waves
lashed to foam with the long, low moan of the world-devouring serpent
which, legend says, is ever an-hungering to devour voyageurs on life's
sea. And for all the world that reef of combing breakers was not unlike
a serpent type of malignant elements bent on man's destruction!

Then, to the amaze of us all, we had left the lower river. The canoe was
cutting up-stream against a new current; and the moan of the pounding
surf receded to the rear. Clouds blew inla