about it
when you came to think, also.

"Where shall I paddle to?" inquired Jean Boucher, drawing in his
breath. The canoe leaped ahead, grazing hands stretched out to seize
it.

"To the other side of the river."

"Down the rapids?"

"Yes."

"Go down rough or go down smooth?"

"Rough--rough--where they cannot catch you."

The old canoeman snorted. He would like to see any of them catch him.
They were straining after him, and half a dozen canoes shot down that
glassy slide which leads to the rocks.

It takes three minutes for a skillful paddler to run that dangerous
race of three quarters of a mile. Jean Boucher stood at the prow, and
the waves boiled as high as his waist. Jacques dreaded only that the
windigo might move and destroy the delicate poise of the boat; but she
lay very still. The little craft quivered from rock to rock without
grazing one, rearing itself over a great breaker or sinking under a
crest of foam. Now a billow towered up, and Jean broke it with his
paddle, shouting his joy. Showers fell on the woman coiled in the
bottom of the boat. They were going down very rough indeed. Yells from
the other canoes grew less distinct. Jacques turned his head, keeping
a true balance, and saw that their pursuers were skirting toward the
shore. They must make a long detour to catch him after he reached the
foot of the fall.

The roar of awful waters met him as he looked ahead. Jean Boucher
drove the paddle down and spoke to his son. The canoe leaned sidewise,
sucked by the first chute, a caldron in the river bed where all Ste.
Marie's current seemed to go down, and whirl, and rise, and froth, and
roar.

"Ha!" shouted Jean Boucher. His face glistened with beads of water and
the glory of mastering Nature.

Scarcely were they past the first pit when the canoe plunged on the
verge of another. This sight was a moment of madness. The great chute,
lined with moving water walls and floored with whirling foam, bellowed
as if it were submerging the world. Columns of green water sheeted in
white rose above it and fell forward on the current. As the canoemen
held on with their paddles and shot by through spume and rain, every
soul in the boat exulted except the woman who lay flat on its keel.
The rapids gave a voyager the illusion that they were running uphill
to meet him, that they were breasting and opposing him instead of
carrying him forward. There was scarcely a breath between riding the
edge of the bottom