139Melindy and the Lynxes
The deep, slow-gathering snows of mid-February had buried away every stump in the pasture lot and muffled from sight all the zigzag fences of the little lonely clearing. The Settlement road was simply smoothed out of existence. The log cabin, with its low roof and one chimney, seemed half sunken in the snow which piled itself over the lower panes of its three tiny windows.
The log barn, and the lean-to, which served as wood-shed and wagon-house, showed little more than the black edges of their snow-covered roofs over the glittering and gently billowing white expanse.
In the middle of the yard the little well-house, shaped like the top of a “grandfather’s clock,” carried a thick, white, crusted cap, and was encircled with a streaky, irregular mass of ice, which had gradually accumulated almost up to the brim of the watering-trough. From the cabin door to the door of the barn, and over most of the yard space, but particularly in front of the sunward-facing lean-to, the snow was trodden down and littered with chips and straw.140
Here in the mocking sunshine huddled four white sheep, while half a dozen hens and a red Shanghai cock scratched in the litter beside them. The low door of the barn was tightly closed to protect the cow and horse from the bitter cold––which the sheep, with their great fleeces, did not seem to mind.
Inside the cabin, where an old-fashioned, high-ovened kitchen stove, heated to the point where a dull red glow began to show itself in spots, kept the close air at summer temperature, a slim girl with fluffy, light hair and pale complexion stood by the table, vigorously mixing a batter of buckwheat flour for pancakes. Her slender young arms were streaked with flour, as was her forehead also, from her frequent efforts to brush her hair out of her eyes by quick upward dashes of her forearm.
On the other side of the stove, so close to it that her rugged face was reddened by the heat, sat a massive old woman in a heavy rocking-chair, knitting. She knitted impetuously, impatiently, as if resenting the employment of her vigorous old fingers upon so mild a task.
Through a clear space in one pane of the window beside her––a space where the heat within had triumphed over the frost without––she cast restless, keen eyes out across the yard to the place where the road, the one link between the cabin and the settlement, lay smothered from sight.
“It’s one week to-day, Melindy,” she announced141in a voice of accusing indignation, “since there’s been a team got through; and it’s going to be another before they’ll get the road broke out!”
“Like as not, Granny,” responded the girl, beating the batter with an impatience that belied the cheerfulness of her tone. “But what does it matter, anyway? We’re all right here for a month!”
As she spoke, however, her eyes, too, gazed out wistfully over the buried road. She was wearying for the sound of bells and for a drive into the Settlement.
Meanwhile, from the edge of the woods on the other side of the cabin, hidden from the keen eyes within by the roofs of the barn and the shed, came two great, grey, catlike beasts, creeping belly to the snow.
Their broad, soft-padded paws were like snow shoes, bearing them up on the wind-packed surface. Their tufted ears stood straight up, alert for any unwonted sound. Their absurd stub tails, not four inches long, and looking as if they had been bitten off, twitched with eagerness. Their big round eyes, of a pale greenish yellow, and with the pupils narrowed to upright, threadlike black slits by the blinding glare, glanced warily from side to side with every step they took.
The lynxes had the keenest dislike to crossing the open pasture in this broad daylight, but they had been driven by hunger to the point where the customs142and cautions of their wary kind are recklessly thrown aside. Hunger had driven the pair to hunt together, in the hope of together pulling down game too powerful for one to master alone. Hunger had overcome their savage aversion to the neighbourhood of man, and brought them out in the dark of night to prowl about the barn and sniff longingly the warm smell of the sheep, steaming through the cracks of the clumsy door.
Watching from under the snow-draped branches, they had observed that only in the daytime were the sheep let out from their safe shelter behind the clumsy door. And now, forgetting everything but the fierce pangs that urged them, the two savage beasts came straight down the rolling slope of the pasture towards the barn.
A few minutes later there came from the yard a wild screeching and cackling of the hens, followed by a trampling rush and agonized bleating. The old woman half rose from her chair, but sank back instantly, her face creased with a spasm of pain, for she was crippled by rheumatism. The girl dropped her big wooden spoon on the floor and rushed to the window that looked out upon the yard. Her pale face went paler with horror, then flushed with wrath and pity; and a fierce light flashed into her wide blue eyes.
“It’s lynxes!” she cried, snatching up the wooden spoon and darting for the door. “And they’ve143got one of the sheep! Oh, oh, they’re tearing it!”
“Melindy!” shouted the old woman, in a voice of strident command––such a compelling voice that the girl stopped short in spite of herself. “Drop that fool spoon and get the gun!”
The girl dropped the spoon as if it had burned her fingers, and looked irresolutely at the big duck-gun hanging on the log wall. “I can’t fire it!” she exclaimed, shaking her head. “I’d be scared to death of it!”
But even as the words left her mouth, there came another outburst of trampling and frantic clamour from the yard. She snatched up the little, long-handled axe which leaned beside the door-post, threw the door wide open, and with a pitying cry of “Oh! oh!” flew forth to the rescue of her beloved sheep.
“Did you ever see the like of that?” muttered the old woman, her harsh face working with excitement and high approbation. “Scairt to death of a gun––and goes out to fight lynxes all by herself!”
And with painful effort she began hitching herself and the big chair across the floor, seeking a position where she could both reach the gun and command a view through the wide-open door.
When Melindy, her heart aflame with pity for the helpless ewes, rushed out into the yard, she saw one woolly victim down, kicking silently on the bloodstained snow, while a big lynx, crouched144upon its body, turned upon her a pair of pale eyes that blazed with fury at the interruption to his feast.
The other sheep were foundered helplessly in the deep snow back of the well––except one. This one, which had evidently been headed off from the flock, and driven round to the near side of the watering-trough before its savage enemy overtook it, was not half a dozen paces from the cabin door. It was just stumbling forward upon its nose, with a despairingbaa-a-a!while the second and larger lynx, clinging upon its back, clutched hungrily for its throat through the thick, protecting wool.
On ordinary occasions the girl was as timid as her small, pale face and gentle blue eyes made her look. At this crisis, however, a sort of fury of compassion swept all fear from her heart.
Like the swoop of some strange bird, her skirts streaming behind her, she flung herself upon the great cat, and aimed a lightning blow at his head with her axe. In her frail grip the axe turned, so that the brute caught the flat of it instead of the edge.
Half-stunned, he lost his hold and fell with a startledpfiffon the snow, while his victim, bleeding, but not mortally hurt, ran bleating towards the rest of the flock, where they floundered, stupidly helpless, in three feet of soft snow.
The next moment the baffled lynx recovered himself, and faced the girl with so menacing a snarl that she hesitated to follow up her advantage,145but paused, holding the axe in readiness to repel attack.
For a few seconds they faced each other so, the girl and the beast. Then the pale, beast eyes shifted under the steady, dominating gaze of the blue human ones; and at last, with a spitting growl, which ended in a hoarse screech of rage, the big cat bounded aside and whisked behind the well-house. The next moment it was again among the sheep, where they huddled incapable of a struggle.
Again the girl sprang to the rescue; and now, because of that one flash of fear which had deprived her of her first advantage, her avenging wrath was fiercer and more resolute than before. This time, as she darted upon the enemy, she gave an involuntary cry of rage, piercing and unnatural. At this unexpected sound the lynx, desperate though he was with rage and hunger, lost his courage.
Seeing the girl towering almost over him, he doubled back with a mighty leap, just avoiding the vengeful sweep of the axe, and darted back to the front of the shed, where his mate was now ravenously feasting on her easy prey.
Although the first victim was now past all suffering, being no more a motive for heroism than so much mutton, the girl’s blood was too hot with triumphant indignation to let her think of such an unimportant point as that. She was victor. She146had outfaced and routed the foe. She had saved one victim. She would avenge the other.
With the high audacity of those who have overcome fear, she now, with a hysterical cry of menace, ran at the two lynxes, to drive them from their prey.
The situation which she now confronted, however, was altogether changed from what had gone before. The two lynxes were together, strong in that alliance which they had formed for purpose of battle. They were fairly mad with famine––or, indeed, they would never have ventured on the perilous domains of man.
Moreover, they were in possession of what they held to be their lawful prey––a position in defence of which all the hunting tribes of the wild will fight against almost any odds. As they saw their strange adversary approaching, the hair stood straight up along their backs, their little tails puffed to bottle brushes, their ears lay flat back on their heads, and they screeched defiance in harsh unison. Then, as if by one impulse, they turned from their prey and crept stealthily towards her.
They did not like that steady light in her blue eyes, but they felt by some instinct that she was young and unstable of nerve. At this unexpected move on their part the girl stopped short, suddenly undecided whether to fight or flee.
At once the lynxes stopped also, and crouched flat, tensely watching, their claws dug deep into the147hard-trodden snow so as to give them purchase for an instant, powerful spring in any direction.
In the meantime, however, the crippled old woman within doors had not been idle. Great of spirit, and still mighty of sinew for all her ailment, she had managed to work the weight of the heavy chair and her own solid bulk all the way across the cabin floor. Being straight in front of the door, she had seen almost all that happened; and her brave old berserk heart was bursting with pride in the courage of this frail child, whom she had hitherto regarded with a kind of affectionate scorn.
The Griffises of Nackawick and Little River had always been sizable men, men of sinew and bulk, and women tall and ruddy; and this small, blue-eyed girl had seemed to her, in a way, to wrong the stock. But she was quick to understand that the stature of the spirit is what counts most of all.
Now, in this moment of breathless suspense, when she saw Melindy and the two great beasts thus holding each other eye to eye in a life and death struggle of wills, her heart was convulsed with a wild fear. In the spasm of it she succeeded in lifting herself almost erect, and so gained possession of the big duck-gun, which her son Jake, now away in the lumber woods, always kept loaded and ready for use. As she cocked it and settled back into her chair, she called in a piercing voice––148
“Don’t stir one step, Melindy! I’m going to shoot!”
The girl never stirred a muscle, although she turned pale with terror of the loud noise which was about to shock her ears. The two lynxes, however, turned their heads, and fixed the pale glare of their eyes upon the figure seated in the doorway.
The next moment came a spurt of red flame, a belch of smoke, a tremendous report that seemed as if it must have shattered every pane of glass in the cabin windows. The bigger of the two lynxes turned straight over backward and lay without a quiver, smashed by the heavy charge of buckshot with which Jake had loaded the gun. The other, grazed by a scattering pellet, sprang into the air with a screech, then turned and ran for her life across the snow, stretching out like a terrified cat.
With a proud smile the old woman stood the smoking gun against the wall and straightened her cap. For perhaps half a minute Melindy stood rigid, staring at the dead lynx. Then, dropping her axe, she fled to the cabin, flung herself down with her face in her grandmother’s lap, and broke into a storm of sobs.
The old woman gazed down upon her with some surprise, and stroked the fair, fluffy head lovingly as she murmured: “There, there! There’s nothing to take on about! Though you be such a little mite of a towhead, you’ve got the grit, you’ve got the149grit, Melindy Griffis. It’s proud of you I am, and it’s proud your father’ll be when I tell him about it.”
Then, as the girl’s weeping continued, and her slender shoulders continued to twist with her sobs, the rugged old face that bent above her grew tenderly solicitous.
“There, there!” she murmured again. “’Tain’t good for you to take on so, deary. Hadn’t you better finish beating up the pancakes before the batter spiles?”
Thus potently adjured, although she knew as well as her grandmother that there was no immediate danger of the batter spoiling, the girl got up, dashed the back of her hand across her eyes with a little laugh, closed the door, got out another spoon from the table drawer, and cheerfully resumed her interrupted task of mixing pancakes. And the sheep, having slowly extricated themselves from the deep snow behind the well-house, huddled together, with heads down, in the middle of the yard, fearfully eyeing the limp body which lay before the shed.
150Mrs. Gammit’s Pig
“I’ve come to borry yer gun!” said Mrs. Gammit, appearing suddenly, a self-reliant figure, at the open door of the barn where Joe Barron sat mending his harness. She wore a short cotton homespun petticoat and a dingy waist; while a limp pink cotton sunbonnet, pushed far back from her perspiring forehead, released unmanageable tufts of her stiff, iron-grey hair.
“What beyouawantin’ of a gun, Mrs. Gammit?” inquired the backwoodsman, looking up without surprise. He had not seen Mrs. Gammit, to be sure, for three months; but he had known all the time that she was there, on the other side of the ridge, one of his nearest neighbours, and not more than seven or eight miles away as the crow flies.
“It’s the bears!” she explained. “They do be gittin’ jest a leetle mitetoosassy, down to my place. There ain’t no livin’ with ’em. They come rootin’ round in the garden, nights. An’ they’ve et up the white top-knot hen, with the whole settin’ of eggs, that was to hev’ hatched out next Monday. An’151they’ve took the duck. An’ last night they come after the pig.”
“They didn’t githim, did they?” inquired Joe Barron sympathetically.
“No, siree!” responded Mrs. Gammit with decision. “An’ they ain’t agoin’ to! They scairt him though, snuffin’ round outside the pen, trying to find the way in.––I’ve hearn tell they was powerful fond of pork.––He set up sich a squealin’ it woke me; an’ I yelled at ’em out of the winder. I seen one big black chap lopin’ off behind the barn. I hadn’t nothin’ but the broom fer a weapon, so he got away from me. I’ll git him to-night, though, I reckon, if I kin have the loan of your gun.”
“Sartain,” assented the woodsman, laying down the breech-strap he was mending. “Did you ever fire a gun?” he inquired suddenly, as he was starting across the yard to fetch the weapon from his cabin.
“I can’t rightly say I hev’,” answered Mrs. Gammit, with a slight note of scorn in her voice. “But from the kind of men I’ve seen askin, I reckon it ain’t no great trick to larn.”
Joe Barron laughed, and went for the weapon. He had plenty of confidence in his visitor’s ability to look out for herself, and felt reasonably sure that the bears would be sorry for having presumed upon her unprotected state. When he returned with the gun––an old, muzzle-loading duck-gun, with a huge152bore––she accepted it with careless ease and held it as if it were a broom. But when he offered her the powder-horn and a little bag of buckshot, she hesitated.
“What bethemfor?” she inquired.
Joe Barren looked serious.
“Mrs. Gammit,” said he, “I know you kin do most anything a man kin do––an’ do it better, maybe! A woman like you don’t have to apologize for nothin’. But you was notbrung upin the woods, an’ you can’t expect to know all about a gun jest byheftin’it. Folks that’s been brung up in town, like you, have to betoldhow to handle a gun. This here gun ain’tloaded. And them ’ere’s the powder an’ buckshot to load her with. An’ here’s caps,” he added, producing a small, brown tin box of percussion caps from his trousers pocket.
Mrs. Gammit felt abashed at her ignorance, but gratified, at the same time, by the reproach of metropolitanism. This implication of town-bred incompetency was most flattering to the seven frame houses and one corner store of Burd Settlement, whence she hailed.
“I reckon you’d better show me how to load the thing, Mr. Barron,” she agreed quite humbly. And her keen grey eyes took in every detail, as the woodsman rammed home the powder hard, wadded down the charge of buckshot lightly, and pointed out where she must put the percussion cap when she153should be ready to call upon the weapon for its services.
“Then,” said he in conclusion, as he lifted the gun to his shoulder and squinted along the barrel, “of course you know all the rest. Jest shet one eye, an’ git the bead on him fair, an’ let him have it––a leetle back of the fore-shoulder, fer choice! An’thatb’ar ain’t agoin’ to worry about no more pork, nor garden sass. An’ recollect, Mrs. Gammit, at this time of year, when he’s fat on blueberries, he’ll make right prime pork himself, ef he ain’ttooold and rank.”
As Mrs. Gammit strode homeward through the hot, silent woods with the gun––still carrying it as if it were a broom––she had no misgivings as to her fitness to confront and master the most redoubtable of all the forest kindreds. She believed in herself––and not only her native Burd Settlement, but the backwoods generally held that she had cause to. A busy woman always, she had somehow never found time to indulge in the luxury of a husband; but the honorary title of “Mrs.” had early been conferred upon her, in recognition of her abundant and confident personality and her all-round capacity for taking care of herself. To have called her “Miss” would have been an insult to the fitness of things. When, at the age of sixty, she inherited from an only, and strictly bachelor, brother a little farm in the heart of the wilderness, some forty miles154in from the Settlement, no one doubted her ability to fill the rôle of backwoodsman and pioneer. It was vaguely felt that if the backwoods and Mrs. Gammit should fail to agree on any important point, so much the worse for the backwoods.
And indeed, for nearly two years and a half everything had gone swimmingly. The solitude had never troubled Mrs. Gammit, to whom her own company was always congenial––and, as she felt, the only company that one could depend upon. Then she had her two young steers, well broken to the yoke; the spotted cow, with one horn turned up and the other down; the grey and yellow cat, with whom she lived on terms of mutual tolerance; a turkey-cock and two turkey hens, of whom she expected much; an assortment of fowls, brown, black, white, red, and speckled; one fat duck, which had so far been nothing but a disappointment to her; and the white pig, which was her pride. No wonder she was never lonely, with all these good acquaintances to talk to. Moreover, the forces of the wild, seeming to recognize that she was a woman who would have her way, had from the first easily deferred to her. The capricious and incomprehensible early frosts of the forest region had spared her precious garden patch; cut-worm and caterpillar had gone by the other way; the pip had overlooked her early chickens; and as for the customary onslaughts of wildcat, weasel, fox, and skunk, she155had met them all with such triumphant success that she began to mistake her mere good luck for the quintessence of woodcraft. In fact, nothing had happened to challenge her infallibility, nothing whatever, until she found that the bears were beginning to concern themselves about her.
To be sure, there was only one bear mixed up in the matter; but he chanced to be so diligent, interested, and resourceful, that it was no wonder he had got himself multiplied many times over in Mrs. Gammit’s indignant imagination. When she told Joe Barron “that the bears was gittin’ so sassy there wasn’t no livin’ with ’em,” she had little notion that what she referred to was just one, solitary, rusty, somewhat moth-eaten animal, crafty with experience and years. This bear, as it chanced, had had advantages in the way of education not often shared by his fellow-roamers of the wilderness. He had passed several seasons in captivity in one of the settlements far south of the Quah-Davic Valley. Afterwards, he had served an unpleasant term in a flea-ridden travelling menagerie, from which a railway smash-up had given him release at the moderate cost of the loss of one eye. During his captivity he had acquired a profound respect for men, as creatures who had a tendency to beat him over the nose and hurt him terribly if he failed to do as they wished, and who held in eye and voice the uncomprehended but irresistible authority of fate.156For women, however, he had learned to entertain a casual scorn. They screamed when he growled, and ran away if he stretched out a paw at them. When, therefore, he had found himself once more in the vast responsible freedom of the forest, and reviving with some difficulty the half-forgotten art of shifting for himself, he had given a wide berth to the hunters’ shacks and the cabins of lumbermen and pioneers. But when, on the other hand, he had come upon Mrs. Gammit’s clearing, and realized, after long and cautious investigations, that its presiding genius was nothing more formidable than one of those petticoated creatures who trembled at his growl, he had licked his chops with pleasant anticipation. Here, at last, was his opportunity,––the flesh-pots of servitude, with freedom.
Nevertheless, the old bear was prudent. He would not presume too quickly, or too far, upon the harmlessness of a petticoat, and––as he had observed from a dense blackberry thicket on the other side of the fence, while she was at work hoeing her potatoes––there was an air about Mrs. Gammit which seemed to give her petticoats the lie. He had watched her for some time before he could quite satisfy himself that she was a mere woman. Then he had tried some nocturnal experiments on the garden, sampling the young squashes which were Mrs. Gammit’s peculiar pride, and finding them so good that he had thought surely something would157happen. Nothing did happen, however, because Mrs. Gammit slept heavily; and her indignation in the morning he had not been privileged to view.
After this he had grown bolder––though always under cover of night. He had sampled everything in the garden––the abundance of his foot-prints convincing Mrs. Gammit that there was also an abundance of bears. From the garden, at length, he had ventured to the yard and the barn. In a half-barrel, in a corner of the shed, he had stumbled upon the ill-fated white top-knot hen, faithfully brooding her eggs. Undeterred by her heroic scolding, and by the trifling annoyance of her feathers sticking in his teeth, he had made a very pleasant meal of her. And still he had heard nothing from Mrs. Gammit, who, for all her indignation, could not depart from her custom of sound sleeping. If he had taken the trouble to return in the morning, he might have perceived that the good lady was far from pleased, and that there was likely to be something doing before long if he continued to take such liberties with her. And then, as we have seen, he had found the duck––butherloss Mrs. Gammit had taken calmly enough, declaring it to be nothing more than a good riddance to bad rubbish.
It was not until the return of moonlight nights that the bear had discovered the white pig, and thus come face to face, at last, with a thoroughly aroused Mrs. Gammit. True to his kind, he did like pork;158but absorbed in the easier adventures of the garden and the shed, he had not at first noted the rich possibilities of the pig-pen, which occupied one corner of the barn, under the loft. Suspicious of traps, he would not, at first, enter the narrow opening of the stable door, the wide main doors being shut. He had preferred rather to sniff around outside at the corner of the barn, under the ragged birch-tree in which the big turkey-cock had his perch. The wakeful and wary old bird, peering down upon him with suspicion, had uttered a sharpqwit, qwit, by way of warning to whom it might concern; while the white pig, puzzled and worried, had sat up in the dark interior of the pen and stared out at him in silence through the cracks between the boards. At last, growing impatient, the bear had caught the edge of a board with his claws, and tried to tear it off. Nothing had come except some big splinters; but the effort, and the terrifying sound that accompanied it, had proved too much for the self-control of the white pig. An ear-splitting succession of squeals had issued from the dark interior of the pen, and the bear had backed off in amazement.
Before he could recover himself and renew his assault, the window of the cabin had gone up with a skittering slam. The white pig’s appeal for help had penetrated Mrs. Gammit’s solid slumbers, and she had understood the situation. “Scat! you brute!” she had yelled frantically, thrusting159head and shoulders so far out through the window that she almost lost her balance in the effort to shake both fists at once.
The bear, not understanding the terms of her invective, had sat up on his haunches and turned his one eye mildly upon the bristling tufts of grey hair which formed a sort of halo around Mrs. Gammit’s virginal nightcap. Then Mrs. Gammit, realizing that the time for action was come, had rushed downstairs to the kitchen, seized the first weapon she could lay hands upon––which chanced to be the broom––flung open the kitchen door, and dashed across the yard, screaming with indignation.
It was certainly an unusual figure that she made in the radiant moonlight, her sturdy, naked legs revolving energetically beneath her sparse nightgown, and the broom whirling vehemently around her head. For a moment the bear had contemplated her with wonder. Then his nerves had failed him. Doubtless, this was a woman––but not quite like the ordinary kind. It was better, perhaps, to be careful. With a reluctant grunt he had turned and fled, indifferent to his dignity. And he had thought best not to stop until he found himself quite beyond the range of Mrs. Gammit’s disconcerting accents, which rang harsh triumph across the solemn, silvered stillness of the forest.
It was, of course, this imminent peril to the pig which had roused Mrs. Gammit to action and sent160her on that long tramp over the ridges to borrow Joe Barron’s gun. In spite of her easy victory in this particular instance, she had appreciated the inches of that bear, and realized that in case of any further unpleasantnesses with him a broom might not prove to be the most efficient of weapons. With the gun, however, and her distinct remembrance of Joe Barron’s directions for its use, she felt equal to the routing of any number of bears––provided, of course, they would not all come on together. As the idea flashed across her mind that there might be a pack of bears to face, she felt uneasy for a second, and even thought of bringing the pig into the house for the night, and conducting her campaign from the bedroom window. Then she remembered she had never heard of bears hunting in packs, and her little apprehension vanished. In fact, she now grew quite eager for night to bring the fray.
It was a favourite saw of Mrs. Gammit’s that “a watched pot takes long to bile”; and her experience that night exemplified it. With the kitchen door ajar, she sat a little back from the window. Herself hidden, she had a clear view across the bright yard. Very slowly the round moon climbed the pallid summer sky, changing the patterns of the shadows as she rose. But the bear came not. Mrs. Gammit began to think, even to fear, that her impetuosity of the night before had frightened him away. At last her reveries grew confused. She sat up very161straight, and blinked very hard, to make sure that she was quite awake. Just as she had got herself most perfectly reassured on this point, her head sank gently forward upon the window-sill, and she slept deeply, with her cheek against the cold, brown barrel of the gun.
Yes, the bear had hesitated long that night. And he came late. The moon had swung past her zenith, and was pointing her black shadows across the yard in quite another direction when he came. By this time he had recovered confidence and made up his mind that Mrs. Gammitwasonly a woman. After sniffing once more at the cracks to assure himself that the pig was still there, he went around to the stable door and crept cautiously in.
As his clumsy black shape appeared in the bright opening, the pig saw it. It filled his heart with a quite justifiable horror, which found instant poignant expression. Within those four walls the noise was so startlingly loud that, in spite of himself, the bear drew back––not intending to retreat, indeed, but only to consider. As it chanced, however, seeing out of only one eye, he backed upon the handle of a hay rake which was leaning against the wall. The rake very properly resented this. It fell upon him and clutched at his fur like a live thing. Startled quite out of his self-possession, he retreated hurriedly into the moonlight, for further consideration of these unexpected phenomena. And as he162did so, across the yard the kitchen door was flung open, and Mrs. Gammit, with the gun, rushed forth.
The bear had intended to retire behind the barn for a few moments, the better to weigh the situation. But at the sight of Mrs. Gammit’s fluttering petticoat he began to feel annoyed. It seemed to him that he was being thwarted unnecessarily. At the corner of the barn, just under the jutting limb of the birch-tree, he stopped, turned, and sat up on his haunches with a growl. The old turkey-cock, stretching his lean neck, glared down upon him with a terseqwit! qwit!of disapproval.
When the bear stopped, in that resolute and threatening attitude, Mrs. Gammit instinctively stopped too. Not, as she would have explained had there been any one to explain to, that she was “one mite scairt,” but that she wanted to try Joe Barren’s gun. Raising the gun to her shoulder, she shut one eye, looked carefully at the point of the barrel with the other, and pulled the trigger. Nothing whatever happened. Lowering the weapon from her shoulder she eyed it severely, and perceived that she had forgotten to cock it. At this a shade of embarrassment passed over her face, and she glanced sharply at the bear to see if he had noticed her mistake. Apparently, he had not. He was still sitting there, regarding her unpleasantly with his one small eye.
“Ye needn’t think ye’re agoin to git off, jest because163I made a leetle mistake like that!” muttered Mrs. Gammit, shutting her teeth with a snap, and cocking the gun as she raised it once more to her shoulder.
Now, as it chanced, Joe Barren had neglected to tell her which eye to shut, so, not unnaturally, Mrs. Gammit shut the one nearest to the gun––nearest to the cap which was about to go off. She also neglected to consider the hind-sight. It was enough for her that the muzzle of the gun seemed to cover the bear. Under these conditions she got a very good line on her target, but her elevation was somewhat at fault. She pulled the trigger.
This time it was all right. There was a terrific, roaring explosion, and she staggered backwards under the savage kick of the recoil. Recovering herself instantly, and proud of the great noise she had made, she peered through the smoke, expecting to see the bear topple over upon his nose, extinguished. Instead of that, however, she observed a convulsive flopping of wings in the birch-tree above the bear’s head. Then, with one reproachful “gobble” which rang loud in Mrs. Gammit’s ears, the old turkey-cock fell heavily to the ground. He would have fallen straight upon the bear, but that the latter, his nerves completely upset by so much disturbance, was making off at fine speed through the bushes.
The elation on Mrs. Gammit’s face gave way to164consternation. Then she reddened to the ears with wrath, dashed the offending gun to the ground, and stamped on it. She had done her part, that she knew, but the wretched weapon had played her false. Well, she had never thought much of guns, anyway. Henceforth she would depend on herself.
The unfortunate turkey-cock now lay quite still. Mrs. Gammit crossed the yard and bent over the sprawling body in deep regret. She had had a certain affection for the noisy and self-sufficient old bird, who had been “company” for her as he strutted “gobbling” about the yard with stiff-trailed wings while his hens were away brooding their chicks. “Too bad!” she muttered over him, by way of requiem; “too bad ye had to go an’ git in the road o’ that blame gun!” Then, suddenly bethinking herself that a fowl was more easily plucked while yet warm, she carried the limp corpse, head downward, across the yard, fetched a basket from the kitchen, sat down on the doorstep in the moonlight, and began sadly stripping the victim of his feathers. He was a fine, heavy bird. As she surveyed his ample proportions Mrs. Gammit murmured thoughtfully: “I reckon as how I’m goin’ to feel kinder sick o’ turkey afore I git this all et up!”
On the following day Mrs. Gammit carefully polished the gun with a duster, removing all trace of the indignities she had put upon it, and stood it165away behind the dresser. She had resolved to conduct the rest of the campaign against the bears in her own way and with her own weapons. The way and the weapons she now proceeded to think out with utmost care.
Being a true woman and a true housewife, it was perhaps inevitable that she should think first, and, after due consideration given to everything else, including pitchforks and cayenne pepper, that she should think last and finally, of the unlimited potentialities of boiling water. To have it actually boiling, at the critical moment, would of course be impracticable; but with a grim smile she concluded that she could manage to have it hot enough for her purpose. She had observed that this bear which was after the pig had learned the way into the pen. She felt sure that, having found from experience that loud noises did not produce bodily injuries, he would again come seeking the pig, and this time with more confidence than ever.
On this point, thanks to her ignorance of bears in general, she was right. Most bears would have been discouraged. But this bear in particular had learned that when men started out to be disagreeable to bears, they succeeded only too well. He had realized clearly that Mrs. Gammit had intended to be disagreeable to him. There was no mistaking her intentions. But she had not succeeded. Ergo, she was not, as he had almost feared, a man, but166really and truly a woman. He came back the next night fully determined that no squeals, or brooms, or flying petticoats, or explosions, should divert him from his purpose and his pork. He came early; but not, as it chanced, too early for Mrs. Gammit, who seemed somehow to have divined his plans and so taken time by the forelock.
The pen of the white pig, as we have already noted, was in a corner of the barn, and under one end of the loft. Immediately above the point where the bear would have to climb over, in order to get into the pen, Mrs. Gammit removed several of the loose boards which formed the flooring of the loft. Beside this opening, at an early hour, she had ensconced herself in secure ambuscade, with three pails of the hottest possible hot water close beside her. The pails were well swathed in blankets, quilts, and hay, to keep up the temperature of their contents. And she had also a pitchfork “layin’ handy,” wherewith to push the enemy down in case he should resent her attack and climb up to expostulate.
Mrs. Gammit had not time to grow sleepy, or even impatient, so early did the bear arrive. The white pig, disturbed and puzzled by the unwonted goings-on above his head, had refused to go to bed. He was wandering restlessly up and down the pen, when, through the cracks, he saw an awful black shadow darken the stable door. He lost not a167second, but lifted his voice at once in one of those ear-piercing appeals which had now twice proved themselves so effective.
The bear paused but for a moment, to cast his solitary eye over the situation. Mrs. Gammit fairly held her breath. Then, almost before she could realize what he was doing, he was straight beneath her, and clambering into the pen. The white pig’s squeals redoubled, electrifying her to action. She snatched a steaming bucket from its wrappings, and dashed it down upon the vaguely heaving form below.
On the instant there arose a strange, confused, terrific uproar, from which the squeals of the white pig stood out thin and pathetic. Without waiting to see what she had accomplished, Mrs. Gammit snatched up the second bucket, and leaned forward to deliver a second stroke. Through a cloud of steam she saw the bear reaching wildly for the wall of the pen, clawing frantically in his eagerness to climb over and get away. She had given him a lesson, that was clear; but she was resolved to give him a good one while she was about it. Swinging far forward, she launched her terrible missile straight upon his huge hind-quarters just as they went over the wall. But at the same moment she lost her balance. With an indignant yell she plunged downward into the pen.
It was like Mrs. Gammit, however, that even in168this dark moment her luck should serve her. She landed squarely on the back of the pig. This broke her fall, and, strangely enough, did not break the pig. The latter, quite frenzied by the accumulation of horrors heaped upon him, bounced frantically from beneath her indiscreet petticoats, and dashed himself from one side of the pen to the other with a violence that threatened to wreck both pig and pen.
Somewhat breathless, but proudly conscious that she had won a splendid victory, Mrs. Gammit picked herself up and shook herself together. The bear had vanished. She eyed with amazement the continued gyrations of the pig.
“Poor dear!” she muttered presently, “some o’ the bilin’ water must ’ave slopped on to him! Oh, well, I reckon he’ll git over it bime-by. Anyhow, it’s a sight better’n being all clawed an’ et up by a bear, I reckon!”
Mrs. Gammit now felt satisfied that this particular bear would trouble her no more, and she had high hopes that his experience with hot water would serve as a lesson to all the other bears with whom she imagined herself involved. The sequel fulfilled her utmost expectations. The bear, smarting from his scalds and with all his preconceived ideas about women overthrown, betook himself in haste to another and remoter hunting-ground. A good deal of his hair came off, in patches, and for a169long time he had a rather poor opinion of himself.
When, for over a week, there had been no more raids upon barn or chicken-roost, and no more bear-tracks about the garden, Mrs. Gammit knew that her victory had been final, and she felt so elated that she was even able to enjoy her continuing diet of cold turkey. Then, one pleasant morning when a fresh, sweet-smelling wind made tumult in the forest, she took the gun home to Joe Barren.
“What luck did ye hev, Mrs. Gammit?” inquired the woodsman with interest.
“I settled them bears, Mr. Barren!” she replied. “But it wasn’t the gun as done it. It was bilin’ water. I’ve found ye kin always depend on bilin’ water!”
“I hope the gun acted right by you, however!” said the woodsman.
Mrs. Gammit’s voice took on a tone of reserve.
“Well, Mr. Barren, I thank ye kindly for the loan of the weepon. Yemeantright. But it’s on my mind to warn ye. Don’t ye go for to trust that gun, or ye’ll live to regret it.It don’t hit what it’s aimed at.”
170The Blackwater Pot
The lesson of fear was one which Henderson learned late. He learned it well, however, when the time came. And it was Blackwater Pot that taught him.
Sluggishly, reluctantly, impotently, the spruce logs followed one another round and round the circuit of the great stone pot. The circling water within the pot was smooth and deep and black, but streaked with foam. At one side a gash in the rocky rim opened upon the sluicing current of the river, which rushed on, quivering and seething, to plunge with a roar into the terrific cauldron of the falls. Out of that thunderous cauldron, filled with huge tramplings and the shriek of tortured torrents, rose a white curtain of spray, which every now and then swayed upward and drenched the green birches which grew about the rim of the pot. For the break in the rim, which caught at the passing current and sucked it into the slow swirls of Blackwater Pot, was not a dozen feet from the lip of the falls.171
Henderson sat at the foot of a ragged white birch which leaned from the upper rim of the pot. He held his pipe unlighted, while he watched the logs with a half-fascinated stare. Outside, in the river, he saw them in a clumsy panic haste, wallowing down the white rapids to their awful plunge. When a log came close along shore its fate hung for a second or two in doubt. It might shoot straight on, over the lip, into the wavering curtain of spray and vanish into the horror of the cauldron. Or, at the last moment, the eddy might reach out stealthily and drag it into the sullen wheeling procession within the pot. All that it gained here, however, was a terrible kind of respite, a breathing-space of agonized suspense. As it circled around, and came again to the opening by which it had entered, it might continue on another eventless revolution, or it might, according to the whim of the eddy, be cast forth once more, irretrievably, into the clutch of the awful sluice. Sometimes two logs, after a pause in what seemed like a secret death-struggle, would crowd each other out and go over the falls together. And sometimes, on the other hand, all would make the circuit safely again and again. But always, at the cleft in the rim of the pot, there was the moment of suspense, the shuddering, terrible panic.
It was this recurring moment that seemed to fasten itself balefully upon Henderson’s imagination, so that he forgot to smoke. He had looked into172the Blackwater before, but never when there were any logs in the pot. Moreover, on this particular morning, he was overwrought with weariness. For a little short of three days he had been at the utmost tension of body, brain, and nerve, in hot but wary pursuit of a desperado whom it was his duty, as deputy-sheriff of his county, to capture and bring to justice.
This outlaw, a French half-breed, known through the length and breadth of the wild backwoods county as “Red Pichot,” was the last but one––and accounted the most dangerous––of a band which Henderson had undertaken to break up. Henderson had been deputy for two years, and owed his appointment primarily to his pre-eminent fitness for this very task. Unacquainted with fear, he was at the same time unrivalled through the backwoods counties for his subtle woodcraft, his sleepless endurance, and his cunning.
It was two years now since he had set his hand to the business. One of the gang had been hanged. Two were in the penitentiary, on life sentence. Henderson had justified his appointment to every one except himself. But while Pichot and his gross-witted tool, “Bug” Mitchell, went unhanged, he felt himself on probation, if not shamed. Mitchell he despised. But Pichot, the brains of the gang, he honoured with a personal hatred that held a streak of rivalry. For Pichot, though a beast173for cruelty and treachery, and with the murder of a woman on his black record––which placed him, according to Henderson’s ideas, in a different category from a mere killer of men––was at the same time a born leader and of a courage none could question. Some chance dash of Scotch Highland blood in his mixed veins had set a mop of hot red hair above his black, implacable eyes and cruel, dark face. It had touched his villainies, too, with an imagination which made them the more atrocious. And Henderson’s hate for him as a man was mixed with respect for the adversary worthy of his powers.
Reaching the falls, Henderson had been forced to acknowledge that, once again, Pichot had outwitted him on the trail. Satisfied that his quarry was by this time far out of reach among the tangled ravines on the other side of Two Mountains, he dismissed the two tired river-men who constituted his posse, bidding them go on down the river to Greensville and wait for him. It was his plan to hunt alone for a couple of days in the hope of catching his adversary off guard. He had an ally, unsuspected and invaluable, in a long-legged, half-wild youngster of a girl, who lived alone with her father in a clearing about a mile below the falls, and regarded Henderson with a childlike hero-worship. This shy little savage, whom all the Settlement knew as “Baisley’s Sis,” had an intuitive knowledge of the wilderness174and the trails which rivalled even Henderson’s accomplished woodcraft; and the indomitable deputy “set great store,” as he would have put it, by her friendship. He would go down presently to the clearing and ask some questions of the child. But first he wanted to do a bit of thinking. To think the better, the better to collect his tired and scattered wits, he had stood his Winchester carefully upright between two spruce saplings, filled his pipe, lighted it with relish, and seated himself under the old birch where he could look straight down upon the wheeling logs in Blackwater Pot.
It was while he was looking down into the terrible eddy that his efforts to think failed him and his pipe went out, and his interest in the fortunes of the captive logs gradually took the hold of a nightmare upon his overwrought imagination. One after one he would mark, snatched in by the capricious eddy and held back a little while from its doom. One after one he would see crowded out again, by inexplicable whim, and hurled on into the raging horror of the falls. He fell to personifying this captive log or that, endowing it with sentience, and imagining its emotions each time it circled shuddering past the cleft in the rim, once more precariously reprieved.
At last, either because he was more deeply exhausted than he knew, or because he had fairly dropped asleep with his eyes open and his fantastic175imaginings had slipped into a veritable dream, he felt himself suddenly become identified with one of the logs. It was one which was just drawing around to the fateful cleft. Would it win past once more? No; it was too far out! It felt the grasp of the outward suction, soft and insidious at first, then resistless as the falling of a mountain. With straining nerves and pounding heart Henderson strove to hold it back by sheer will and the wrestling of his eyes. But it was no use. Slowly the head of the log turned outward from its circling fellows, quivered for a moment in the cleft, then shot smoothly forth into the sluice. With a groan Henderson came to his senses, starting up and catching instinctively at the butt of the heavy Colt in his belt. At the same instant the coil of a rope settled over his shoulders, pinioning his arms to his sides, and he was jerked backwards with a violence that fairly lifted him over the projecting root of the birch. As he fell his head struck a stump; and he knew nothing more.
When Henderson came to his senses he found himself in a most bewildering position. He was lying face downwards along a log, his mouth pressed upon the rough bark. His arms and legs were in the water, on either side of the log. Other logs moved past him sluggishly. For a moment he thought himself still in the grip of his nightmare, and he struggled to wake himself. The struggle revealed176to him that he was bound fast upon the log. At this his wits cleared up, with a pang that was more near despair than anything he had ever known. Then his nerve steadied itself back into its wonted control.
He realized what had befallen him. His enemies had back-trailed him and caught him off his guard. He was just where, in his awful dream, he had imagined himself as being. He was bound to one of the logs down in the great stone pot of Blackwater Eddy.
For a second or two the blood in his veins ran ice, as he braced himself to feel the log lurch out into the sluice and plunge into the trampling of the abyss. Then he observed that the other logs were overtaking and passing him. His log, indeed, was not moving at all. Evidently, then, it was being held by some one. He tried to look around, but found himself so fettered that he could only lift his face a few inches from the log. This enabled him to see the whole surface of the eddy and the fateful cleft, and out across the raving torrents into the white curtain that swayed above the cauldron. But he could not, with the utmost twisting and stretching of his neck, see more than a couple of feet up the smooth stone sides of the pot.
As he strained on his bonds he heard a harsh chuckle behind him; and the log, suddenly loosed177with a jerk which showed him it had been held by a pike-pole, began to move. A moment later the sharp, steel-armed end of the pike-pole came down smartly on the forward end of the log, within a dozen inches of Henderson’s head, biting a secure hold. The log again came to a stop. Slowly, under pressure from the other end of the pike-pole, it rolled outward, submerging Henderson’s right shoulder, and turning his face till he could see all the way up the sides of the pot.
What he saw, on a ledge about three feet above the water, was Red Pichot, holding the pike-pole and smiling down upon him smoothly. On the rim above squatted Bug Mitchell, scowling, and gripping his knife as if he thirsted to settle up all scores on the instant. Imagination was lacking in Mitchell’s make-up; and he was impatient––so far as he dared to be––of Pichot’s fantastic procrastinatings.
When Henderson’s eyes met the evil, smiling glance of his enemy they were steady and cold as steel. To Henderson, who had always, in every situation, felt himself master, there remained now no mastery but that of his own will, his own spirit. In his estimation there could be no death so dreadful but that to let his spirit cower before his adversary would be tenfold worse. Helpless though he was, in a position that was ignominiously and grotesquely horrible, and with the imminence of an appalling doom close before his eyes, his nerve never failed178him. With cool contempt and defiance he met Red Pichot’s smile.
“I’ve always had an idee,” said the half-breed, presently, in a smooth voice that penetrated the mighty vibrations of the falls, “ez how a chap on a log could paddle roun’ this yere eddy fer a deuce of a while afore he’d hev to git sucked out into the sluice!”
As a theory this was undoubtedly interesting. But Henderson made no answer.
“I’ve held that idee,” continued Pichot, after a civil pause, “though I hain’t never yet found a man, nor a woman nuther, as was willin’ to give it a fair trial. But I feel sure ye’re the man to oblige me. I’ve left yer arms kinder free, leastways from the elbows down, an’ yer legs also, more or less, so’s ye’ll be able to paddle easy-like. The walls of the pot’s all worn so smooth, below high-water mark, there’s nothin’ to ketch on to, so there’ll be nothin’ to take off yer attention. I’m hopin’ ye’ll give the matter a right fair trial. But ef ye gits tired an’ feels like givin’ up, why, don’t consider my feelin’s. There’s the falls awaitin’. An’ I ain’t agoin’ to bear no grudge ef ye don’t quite come up to my expectations of ye.”
As Pichot ceased his measured harangue he jerked his pike-pole loose. Instantly the log began to forge forward, joining the reluctant procession. For a few moments Henderson felt like shutting his179eyes and his teeth and letting himself go on with all speed to the inevitable doom. Then, with scorn of the weak impulse, he changed his mind. To the last gasp he would maintain his hold on life, and give fortune a chance to save him. When he could no longer resist, then it would be Fate’s responsibility, not his. The better to fight the awful fight that was before him, he put clear out of his mind the picture of Red Pichot and Mitchell perched on the brink above, smoking, and grinning down upon the writhings of their victim. In a moment, as his log drew near the cleft, he had forgotten them. There was room now in all his faculties for but one impulse, one consideration.
The log to which he was bound was on the extreme outer edge of the procession, and Henderson realized that there was every probability of its being at once crowded out the moment it came to the exit. With a desperate effort he succeeded in catching the log nearest to him, pushing it ahead, and at last, just as they came opposite the cleft, steering his own log into its place. The next second it shot quivering forth into the sluice, and Henderson, with a sudden cold sweat jumping out all over him, circled slowly past the awful cleft. A shout of ironical congratulation came to him from the watchers on the brink above. But he hardly heard it, and heeded it not at all. He was striving frantically, paddling forward with one hand and backward with180the other, to steer his sluggish, deep-floating log from the outer to the inner circle. He had already observed that to be on the outer edge would mean instant doom for him, because the outward suction was stronger underneath than on the surface, and his weighted log caught its force before the others did. His arms were so bound that only from the elbows down could he move them freely. He did, however, by a struggle which left him gasping, succeed in working in behind another log––just in time to see that log, too, sucked out into the abyss, and himself once more on the deadly outer flank of the circling procession.
This time Henderson did not know whether the watchers on the brink laughed or not as he won past the cleft. He was scheming desperately to devise some less exhausting tactics. Steadily and rhythmically, but with his utmost force, he back-paddled with both hands and feet, till the progress of his log was almost stopped. Then he succeeded in catching yet another log as it passed and manœuvring in behind it. By this time he was halfway around the pot again. Yet again, by his desperate back-paddling, he checked his progress, and presently, by most cunning manipulation, managed to edge in behind yet another log, so that when he again came round to the cleft there were two logs between him and doom. The outermost of these, however, was dragged instantly forth into the fury of the sluice,181thrust forward, as it was, by the grip of the suction upon Henderson’s own deep log. Feeling himself on the point of utter exhaustion, he nevertheless continued back-paddling, and steering and working inward, till he had succeeded in getting three files of logs between himself and the outer edge. Then, almost blind and with the blood roaring so loud in his ears that he could hardly hear the trampling of the falls, he hung on his log, praying that strength might flow back speedily into his veins and nerves.
Not till he had twice more made the circuit of the pot, and twice more seen a log sucked out from his very elbow to leap into the white horror of the abyss, did Henderson stir. The brief stillness, controlled by his will, had rested him for the moment. He was cool now, keen to plan, cunning to husband his forces. Up to the very last second that he could he would maintain his hold on life, counting always on the chance of the unexpected.
With now just one log remaining between himself and death, he let himself go past the cleft, and saw that one log go out. Then, being close to the wall of the pot, he tried to delay his progress by clutching at the stone with his left hand and by dragging upon it with his foot. But the stone surface was worn so smooth by the age-long polishing of the eddy that these efforts availed him little. Before he realized it he was almost round again,182and only by the most desperate struggle did he succeed in saving himself. There was no other log near by this time for him to seize and thrust forward in his place. It was simply a question of his restricted paddling, with hands and feet, against the outward draught of the current. For nearly a minute the log hung in doubt just before the opening, the current sucking at its head to turn it outward, and Henderson paddling against it not only with hands and feet, but with every ounce of will and nerve that his body contained. At last, inch by inch, he conquered. His log moved past the gate of death; and dimly, again, that ironical voice came down to him, piercing the roar.
Once past, Henderson fell to back-paddling again––not so violently now––till other logs came by within his reach and he could work himself into temporary safety behind them. He was soon forced to the conviction that if he strove at just a shade under his utmost he was able to hold his own and keep one log always between himself and the opening. But what was now his utmost, he realized, would very soon be far beyond his powers. Well, there was nothing to do but to keep on trying. Around and around, and again and again around the terrible, smooth, deliberate circuit he went, sparing himself every ounce of effort that he could, and always shutting his eyes as the log beside him plunged out into the sluice. Gradually, then, he felt himself183becoming stupefied by the ceaselessly recurring horror, with the prolonged suspense between. He must sting himself back to the full possession of his faculties by another burst of fierce effort. Fiercely he caught at log after log, without a let-up, till, luck having favoured him for once, he found himself on the inner instead of the outer edge of the procession. Then an idea flashed into his fast-clouding brain, and he cursed himself for not having thought of it before. At the very centre of the eddy, of course, there must be a sort of core of stillness. By a vehement struggle he attained it and avoided crossing it. Working gently and warily he kept the log right across the axis of the eddy, where huddled a crowd of chips and sticks. Here the log turned slowly, very slowly, on its own centre; and for a few seconds of exquisite relief Henderson let himself sink into a sort of lethargy. He was roused by a sudden shot, and the spat of a heavy bullet into the log about three inches before his head. Even through the shaking thunder of the cataract he thought he recognized the voice of his own heavy Colt; and the idea of that tried weapon being turned against himself filled him with childish rage. Without lifting his head he lay and cursed, grinding his teeth impotently. A few seconds later came another shot, and this time the ball went into the log just before his right arm. Then he understood, and woke up. Pichot was a dead shot. This was184his intimation that Henderson must get out into the procession again. At the centre of the eddy he was not sufficiently entertaining to his executioners. The idea of being shot in the head had not greatly disturbed him––he had felt as if it would be rather restful, on the whole. But the thought of getting a bullet in his arm, which would merely disable him and deliver him over helpless to the outdraught, shook him with something near a panic. He fell to paddling with all his remaining strength, and drove his log once more into the horrible circuit. The commendatory remarks with which Pichot greeted this move went past his ears unheard.
Up to this time there had been a strong sun shining down into the pot, and the trees about its rim had stood unstirred by any wind. Now, however, a sudden darkness settled over everything, and sharp, fitful gusts drew in through the cleft, helping to push the logs back. Henderson was by this time so near fainting from exhaustion that his wits were losing their clearness. Only his horror of the fatal exit, the raving sluice, the swaying white spray-curtain, retained its keenness. As to all else he was growing so confused that he hardly realized the way those great indrawing gusts, laden with spray, were helping him. He was paddling and steering and manœuvring for the inner circuit almost mechanically now. When suddenly the blackness about him was lit with a blue glare, and185the thunder crashed over the echoing pot with an explosion that outroared the falls, he hardly noted it. When the skies seemed to open, letting down the rain in torrents, with a wind that almost blew it level, it made no difference to him. He went on paddling dully, indifferent to the bumping of the logs against his shoulders.