Three or four times between sunrise and noon they saw life ashore and on the stream; once a scow tied to a tree, then an Indian camp, and twice trappers’ shacks built in the edge of little clearings.  With the beginning of afternoon Kent felt growing within him something that was not altogether eagerness.  It was, at times, a disturbing emotion, a foreshadowing of evil, a warning for him to be on his guard.  He used the sweep more, to help their progress in the current, and he began to measure time and distance with painstaking care.  He recognized many landmarks.

By four o’clock, or five at the latest, they would strike the head of the Chute.  Ten minutes of its thrilling passage and he would work the scow into the concealment he had in mind ashore, and no longer would he fear the arm of the law that reached out from the Landing.  As he planned, he listened.  From noon on he never ceased to listen for that distant putt, putt, putt, that would give them a mile’s warning of the approach of the patrol launch.

He did not keep his plans to himself.  Marette sensed his growing uneasiness, and he made her a partner of his thoughts.

“If we hear the patrol before we reach the Chute, we’ll still have time to run ashore,” he assured her.  “And they won’t catch us.  We’ll be harder to find than two needles in a haystack.  But it’s best to be prepared.”

So he brought out his pack and Marette’s smaller bundle, and laid his rifle and pistol holster across them.

It was three o’clock when the character of the river began to change, and Kent smiled happily.  They were entering upon swifter waters.  There were places where the channel narrowed, and they sped through rapids.  Only where unbroken straight waters stretched out ahead of them did Kent give his arms a rest at the sweep.  And through most of the straight water he added to the speed of the scow.  Marette helped him.  In him the exquisite thrill of watching her slender, glorious body as it worked with his own never grew old.  She laughed at him over the big oar between them.  The wind and sun played riot in her hair.  Her parted lips were rose-red, her cheeks flushed, her eyes like sun-warmed rock violets.  More than once, in the thrill of that afternoon flight, as he looked at the marvelous beauty of her, he asked himself if it could be anything but a dream.  And more than once he laughed joyously, and paused in his swinging of the sweep, and proved that it was real and true.  And Kent thanked God, and worked harder.

Once, a long time ago, Marette told him, she had been through the Chute.  It had horrified her then.  She remembered it as a sort of death monster, roaring for its victims.  As they drew nearer to it, Kent told her more about it.  Only now and then was a life lost there now, he said.  At the mouth of the Chute there was a great, knife-like rock, like a dragon’s tooth, that cut the Chute into two roaring channels.  If a scow kept to the left-hand channel it was safe.  There would be a mighty roaring and thundering as it swept on its passage, but that roaring of the Chute, he told her, was like the barking of a harmless dog.