ting toward the awful cataract.

They would have braved the Indians now, and attempted a landing, but
from a point directly below the portage trail, and extending to the
white water of the heavy rapids the river bank rose in a perpendicular
rampart of smooth-scoured rock, a full ten feet in height, offering no
possible foothold.

For a little while they hoped, as they worked like madmen. Then the
full import of their position dawned upon them--that they were
hopelessly drifting toward the brink of the awful cataract.

Beads of cold perspiration broke out upon their foreheads. A sickening
numbness came into their hearts, and as in a dream they heard the
derisive, exultant yells of the savages upon the shore.

VIII

AFTER THE INDIAN ATTACK

Below them rose the appalling roar of the hungry rapids and the dull,
thunderous, monotonous undertone of the falls themselves.

Before their vision a vivid picture passed of the scene they had so
recently beheld--the onrushing, white piled billows above the
cataract, gathering strength for their mighty leap--the final plunge
of the resistless torrent--the bank of rainbow-coloured mist hovering
in space over a dark abyss--and far below and beyond the mist-bank the
murky chasm, where a white seething flood was beating its wild anger
out against jagged rocks in its mad endeavour to fight its way to
freedom between narrow canyon walls rising in frowning cliffs on
either side.

Impotent to resist the power that was drawing them down, Shad
Trowbridge and Ungava Bob were certain beyond a doubt that presently
they were to be hurled into this awful chasm, and that in all human
probability but a few minutes more of life remained to them.

Then suddenly there flashed upon Bob's memory the recollection of an
island which he had observed when walking along the river bank from
the falls to the portage trail.

He remembered that this island was of curious formation, with high
polished cliffs rising on its upper end and on either side, like
bulwarks to guard it from the rushing tide.

At its lower end a long, low, gravelly point reached downward, like a
pencil point, among the swirling eddies. The gravel which formed this
point, he had remarked at the time, had been deposited by the eddies
created by the meeting of the waters where they rushed together from
either side below the island.

With the recollection of the island came also a realisation that here
possibly lay a means of