the rapids. The episode has some interest for students of psychology.
Carpenter walked down the bank of the canyon a short distance to
reconnoitre the different channels of the {78} rapids. He was seen to
take out his notebook and write an entry. He then put the note-book in
the inner pocket of his coat, took off the coat, and slung it in a tree
on the bank. When he came back to the canoe, he seemed preoccupied.
The canoe ripped on a rock in midstream, flattened, and sank.
Carpenter went down insensible as though his head had struck and he had
been stunned. Alexander was washed ashore. He found himself on the
side of the bank opposite the rest of the party. Going below to calmer
waters, he swam across. Carpenter's coat hung on the trees. In the
pocket was the note-book, in which Alexander read the astounding words:
'Arrived at Grand Canyon. Ran the canyon and was drowned.' Carpenter
left a wife and child in Toronto, for whom, evidently, he had written
the message. But if he was of sound mind, desiring to live, and so
certain of death that he was able to write his own fate in the past
tense, why did he attempt the rapids? His friends had no explanation
of the curious incident.

There is another gruesome story of a sand-bar in the very middle of
this raging canyon. It will be remembered that some of the Overlanders
had straggled far to the rear. Some {79} time before spring a party of
them attempted to run this canyon. They were never again seen alive.
Some treasure-seekers who came over the trail in spring stranded on
this sand-bar. They found the bodies of the missing men. All but one
had been torn and partly devoured. It need not be told here that no
wild beast could have stemmed the rapids from either side. Unless
wolves or cougars had accidentally been washed to the sand-bar, and
washed away again, the wild solitude must have witnessed a horror too
terrible to be told; for the body of the man who had apparently died
last was fully clothed and unmolested. As absolutely nothing more is
known of what happened than has been set down here, it seems well that
there is no record of the names of these castaways.

{80}

CHAPTER VI

QUESNEL AND KAMLOOPS

The walls of the river lowered and widened, the current slackened, and
the surviving canoes and rafts were presently gliding peacefully down a
smooth stream. That night the Overlanders slept dead with weariness;
but a fearful depression rested