portaging the canoe.  Dick, with marvellous quickness, ducked loose from the tump-line.  The pack bounded down the slant, fell with a splash, and was whirled away.  With the impetus of the same motion the young man twisted himself as violently as possible to regain his footing.  He would probably have succeeded had it not been for the Indian girl.  She had been following the two, a few steps in the rear.  As Dick’s foot turned, she slipped her own pack and sprang forward, reaching out her arm in the hope of steadying him.  Unfortunately she did this only in time to get in the way of the strong twist Dick made for recovery.  The young man tottered for an instant on the very brink of saving himself, then gave it up, and fell as loosely as possible into the current.

May-may-gwan, aghast at what she had done, stood paralyzed, staring into the gorge.  Sam swung the canoe from his shoulders and ran on over the hill and down the other side.

The Indian girl saw the inert body of the woodsman dashed down through the moil and water, now showing an arm, now a leg, only once, for a single instant, the head.  Twice it hit obstacles, limp as a sack of flour.  Then it disappeared.

Immediately she regained the use of her legs, and scrambled over the hill after Sam, her breath strangling her.  She found below the rapids a pool, and half in the water at its edge Dick seated, bruised and cut, spitting water, and talking excitedly to his companion.  Instantly she understood.  The young woods runner, with the rare quickness of expedient peculiar to these people, had allowed himself to be carried through the rapids muscle-loose, as an inanimate object would be carried, without an attempt to help himself in any way.  It was a desperate chance, but it was the only chance.  The slightest stiffening of the muscles, the least struggle would have thrown him out of the water’s natural channel against the bowlders; and then a rigidly held body would have offered only too good a resistance to the shock.  By a miracle of fortune he had been carried through, bruised and injured, to be sure, but conscious.  Sam had dragged him to the bush-grown bank.  There he sat up in the water and cleared his lungs.  He was wildly excited.

“She did it!” he burst Out, as soon as he could speak.  “She did it a purpose!  She reached out and pushed me!  By God, there she is now!”

With the instinct of the hunter he had managed to cling to his rifle.  He wrenched at the magazine lever, throwing the muzzle forward for a shot, but it had been jammed, and he was unable to move it.  “She reached out and pushed me!  I felt her do it!” he cried.  He attempted to rise, but fell back, groaning with a pain that kept him quiet for several moments.

“Sam!” he muttered, “she’s there yet.  Kill her.  Damn it, didn’t you see!  I had my balance again, and she pushed me!  She had it in for me!” His face whitened for an instant as he moved, then flooded with a red anger.  “My God!” he cried, in the anguish of a strong man laid low, “she’s busted me all over!” He wrenched loose his shoulders from Sam’s support, struggled to his knees, and fell back, a groan of pain seeming fairly to burst from his heart.  His head hit sharply against a stone.  He lay still.