e thought of the
woman behind him, and felt the dip and lift, dip and lift, of her
paddle, his mother's women came back to him, one by one, and passed in
long review,--pale, glimmering ghosts, he thought, caricatures of the
stock which had replenished the earth, and which would continue to
replenish the earth.

La Bijou skirted a pivoting floe, darted into a nipping channel, and
shot out into the open with the walls grinding together behind. Tommy
groaned.

"Well done!" Corliss encouraged.

"The fule wumman!" came the backward snarl. "Why couldna she bide a
bit?"

Frona caught his words and flung a laugh defiantly. Vance darted a
glance over his shoulder to her, and her smile was witchery. Her cap,
perched precariously, was sliding off, while her flying hair, aglint in
the sunshine, framed her face as he had seen it framed on the Dyea
Trail.

"How I should like to sing, if it weren't for saving one's breath. Say
the 'Song of the Sword,' or the 'Anchor Chanty.'"

"Or the 'First Chanty,'" Corliss answered. "'Mine was the woman,
darkling I found her,'" he hummed, significantly.

She flashed her paddle into the water on the opposite side in order to
go wide of a jagged cake, and seemed not to hear. "I could go on this
way forever."

"And I," Corliss affirmed, warmly.

But she refused to take notice, saying, instead, "Vance, do you know
I'm glad we're friends?"

"No fault of mine we're not more."

"You're losing your stroke, sir," she reprimanded; and he bent silently
to the work.

La Bijou was driving against the current at an angle of forty-five
degrees, and her resultant course was a line at right angles to the
river. Thus, she would tap the western bank directly opposite the
starting-point, where she could work up-stream in the slacker flood.
But a mile of indented shore, and then a hundred yards of bluffs rising
precipitously from out a stiff current would still lie between them and
the man to be rescued.

"Now let us ease up," Corliss advised, as they slipped into an eddy and
drifted with the back-tide under the great wall of rim-ice.

"Who would think it mid-May?" She glanced up at the carelessly poised
cakes. "Does it seem real to you, Vance?"

He shook his head.

"Nor to me. I know that I, Frona, in the flesh, am here, in a
Peterborough, paddling for dear life with two men; year of our Lord
eighteen hundred and ninety-eight, Alaska, Yukon River; this is water,
that is ice; my arms