not so, that I do
not know." Baron Courbertin smiled self-commiseratingly and went on.
"But it is delightful, magnificent. I have watched and envied. Some day
I shall learn."

"It is not so difficult," St. Vincent interposed. "Is it, Miss Welse?
Just a sure and delicate poise of mind and body--"

"Like the tight-rope dancer?"

"Oh, you are incorrigible," Frona laughed. "I feel certain that you know
as much about canoes as we."

"And you know?--a woman?" Cosmopolitan as the Frenchman was, the
independence and ability for doing of the Yankee women were a perpetual
wonder to him. "How?"

"When I was a very little girl, at Dyea, among the Indians. But next
spring, after the river breaks, we'll give you your first lessons, Mr.
St. Vincent and I. So you see, you will return to civilization with
accomplishments. And you will surely love it."

"Under such charming tutorship," he murmured, gallantly. "But you, Mr.
St. Vincent, do you think I shall be so successful that I may come to
love it? Do you love it?--you, who stand always in the background,
sparing of speech, inscrutable, as though able but unwilling to speak
from out the eternal wisdom of a vast experience." The baron turned
quickly to Frona. "We are old friends, did I not tell you? So I may,
what you Americans call, _josh_ with him. Is it not so, Mr. St.
Vincent?"

Gregory nodded, and Frona said, "I am sure you met at the ends of the
earth somewhere."

"Yokohama," St. Vincent cut in shortly; "eleven years ago, in
cherry-blossom time. But Baron Courbertin does me an injustice, which
stings, unhappily, because it is not true. I am afraid, when I get
started, that I talk too much about myself."

"A martyr to your friends," Frona conciliated. "And such a teller of
good tales that your friends cannot forbear imposing upon you."

"Then tell us a canoe story," the baron begged. "A good one! A--what
you Yankees call--a _hair-raiser_!"

They drew up to Mrs. Schoville's fat wood-burning stove, and St. Vincent
told of the great whirlpool in the Box Canyon, of the terrible corkscrew
in the mane of the White Horse Rapids, and of his cowardly comrade, who,
walking around, had left him to go through alone--nine years before when
the Yukon was virgin.

Half an hour later Mrs. Schoville bustled in, with Corliss in her wake.

"That hill! The last of my breath!" she gasped, pulling off her mittens.
"Never saw such luck!" she declared none the less