t go back just then and tell her that
the search was quite hopeless, and it may have been inherited obstinacy,
but I would not own myself quite beaten yet. So I lay watching the cruel
water slide past, while a host of impossible schemes flashed through my
bewildered brain. They all needed at least a rope, or a few logs, though
one might have been rendered feasible by a small crowbar. But I had none
of these things.

Meantime a few white cloudlets drifted across the rift of blue above, and
a cool breadth of shadow darkened the pine on the great rocks. Something
suggested a fringe of smaller firs along the edge of a moor in Lancashire,
and for a moment my thoughts sped back to the little gray-stone church
under the Ling Fell. Then a slow stately droning swelled into a measured
boom and I wondered what it was, until it flashed on me that this was a
funeral march I had once heard there on just such a day; and it was
followed by a voice reading something faint and far away, snatches of
which reached me brokenly, "In the sure and certain hope," and again,
"Blessed are the dead."

There was, perhaps, a reason for such fancies, though I did not know it at
that time, for, as I found afterward by the deep score across the scalp,
my head must have been driven against the stone with sufficient violence
to destroy forever the balance of a less thickly covered brain. However,
it could not have lasted more than a few moments before I knew that the
funeral march was only the boom of the river, and if I would not have it
as sole requiem for one who was dearer far than life to me I must summon
all my powers of invention. The waters had risen several inches since I
first flung myself down. Great events hang on very small ones, and we
might well have left our bones in the canyon, but that when crawling over a
boulder I slipped and fell heavily, and, when for a moment I lay with my
head almost in the river, I could see from that level something in the
eddy behind a rock on the further shore which had remained unnoticed
before.

It was a dark object, half-hidden among grinding fragments of driftwood
and great flakes of spume, but I caught hard at my breath when a careful
scrutiny showed that beyond all doubt it was the overturned canoe. Still,
at first sight, it seemed beyond the power of flesh and blood to reach it.
The rapid would apparently sweep the strongest swimmer down the canyon,
while the revolving pool span suggestively in narrow