end. With long, buoyant swing the boat sailed
down, shot over the first waves, was caught and lifted upon the great
swell and impelled straight toward the cliff. Huge whirlpools raced
alongside, and from them came a horrible, engulfing roar. Monstrous
bulges rose on the other side. All the stupendous power of that mighty
river of downward-rushing silt swung the boat aloft, up and up, as the
swell climbed the wall. Shefford, with transfixed eyes and harrowed
soul, watched the wet black wall. It loomed down upon him. The stern of
the boat went high. Then when the crash that meant doom seemed imminent
the swell spread and fell back from the wall and the boat never struck
at all. By some miraculous chance it had been favored by a strange
and momentary receding of the huge spent swell. Then it slid back, was
caught and whirled by the current into a red, frothy, up-flung rapids
below. Shefford bowed his head over. Fay and saw no more, nor felt nor
heard. What seemed a long time after that the broken voice of the Mormon
recalled him to his labors.

The boat was half full of water. Nas Ta Bega scooped out great sheets
of it with his hands. Shefford sprang to aid him, found the shovel, and
plunged into the task. Slowly but surely they emptied the boat. And then
Shefford saw that twilight had fallen. Joe was working the craft toward
a narrow bank of sand, to which, presently, they came, and the Indian
sprang out to moor to a rock.

The fugitives went ashore and, weary and silent and drenched, they
dropped in the warm sand.

But Shefford could not sleep. The river kept him awake. In the distance
it rumbled, low, deep, reverberating, and near at hand it was a thing of
mutable mood. It moaned, whined, mocked, and laughed. It had the soul of
a devil. It was a river that had cut its way to the bowels of the earth,
and its nature was destructive. It harbored no life. Fighting its way
through those dead walls, cutting and tearing and wearing, its heavy
burden of silt was death, destruction, and decay. A silent river, a
murmuring, strange, fierce, terrible, thundering river of the desert!
Even in the dark it seemed to wear the hue of blood.

All night long Shefford heard it, and toward the dark hours before dawn,
when a restless, broken sleep came to him, his dreams were dreams of a
river of sounds.

All the beautiful sounds he knew and loved he heard--the sigh of the
wind in the pines, the mourn of the wolf, the cry of the laughin