le. And, staring forward with drawn-back lips
and eyes wide open, I could see the white face in the stern.

Thanking Providence that I could swim well, I swung my left arm forward
with hollowed palm, and shot away from the beast with head half-buried
under the side-stroke's impetus, making a fierce effort to gain the center
of the flow in time. Something long and dark swept past me. With an
inarticulate gasp of triumph I seized it, managed to fall in head foremost
over the stem, which in a tender craft of that beam is a difficult thing
to do, and then, snatching the second paddle, whirled it madly. I felt the
stout redwood bend at every stroke, my lungs seemed bursting, and there
was a mist before my eyes, but it was borne in on me that I had come too
late, and that already no earthly power could snatch us from the canyon.

Hemlock and boulder, stream-hammered reef and pine, flitted by, closing in
on one another along the half-seen shore. The river frothed white about us
in steep boiling ridges as it raced down the incline, and nearer and
nearer ahead tossed the ghostly spray cloud that veiled the mouth of the
chasm. As we lurched broadside to the rapid each steeper liquid upheaval
broke into the canoe; for every foot I won shoreward the stream swept us
sideways two; and when, grasping the pole, I thrust against a submerged
boulder with all my strength, the treacherous redwood snapped in half.
Then there was a bewildering roar, a blinding shower of spray, and we
were out upon the short slide of glassy green water which divided the tail
of the rapid from the mouth of the canyon. As I flung away the broken pole
and groped for the paddle I saw with eyes that were clouded by blood and
sweat Grace raise her hand as though in a last farewell, and then as she
faced round once more our glances met. She said no word. I could not have
heard if she had, for all sound was swallowed up in one great pulsating
diapason; but she afterward said that she felt impelled to look at me, and
knew that I would turn my head. And so for an instant, there where the
barriers of caste and wealth had melted away before the presence of death,
our two souls met in a bond that should never be broken.

Now there are occasions when even the weakest seem endowed with a special
strength, while a look of blind confidence from the woman he loves is
capable of transforming almost any man, and I knew in the exaltation of
that moment, for my own sake, I had no