For a brief space after the breaking of the scow-sweep Kent did not
move. He felt Marette's arms closing tighter and tighter around his
neck. He caught a flash of her upturned face, the flush of a few
moments before replaced by a deathly pallor, and he knew that without
explanation on his part she understood the almost hopeless situation
they were in. He was glad of that. It gave him a sense of relief to
know that she would not go into a panic, no matter what happened. He
bowed his face to hers, so that he felt the velvety smoothness of her
cheek. She turned her mouth to him, and they kissed. His embrace was
crushing for a moment, fierce with his love for her, desperate with his
determination to keep her from harm.
His brain was working swiftly. There was possibly one chance in ten
that the scow--rudderless and without human guidance--would sweep
safely between the black walls and jagged teeth of the Chute. Even if
the scow made this passage, they would be in the power of the Police,
unless some splendid whimsicality of Fate sent it ashore before the
launch came through.
On the other hand, if it was carried far enough through the lower
rapids, they might swim. And--there was the rifle laying across the
pack. That, after all, was his greatest hope--if the scow made the
passage of the Chute. The bulwarks of the scow would give them greater
protection than the thinner walls of the launch would give to their
pursuers. In his heart there raged suddenly a hatred for that Law of
which he had been a part. It was running them to destruction, and he
would fight. There would not be more than three men in the launch, and
he would kill them, if killing became a necessity.
They were speeding like an unbridled race-horse through the boiling
rapids now. The clumsy craft under their feet twisted and turned. The
dripping tops of great rocks shot past a little out of their channel.
And Marette, with one arm still about his neck, was facing the peril
ahead with him. They could see the Dragon's Tooth, black and grim,
waiting squarely in their path. In another hundred and twenty seconds
they would be upon it--or past it. There was no time for Kent to
explain. He sprang to his pack, whipped a knife from his pocket, and
cut the stout babiche rope that reenforced its straps. In another
instant he was back at Marette's side, fastening the babiche about her
waist. The other end he gave to her, and she tied it about his wrist.
She smiled as she finished the knot. It was a strange, tense little
smile, but it told him that she was not afraid, that she had great
faith in him, and knew what the babiche meant.
"I can swim, Jeems," she cried. "If we strike the rock."
She did not finish because of the sudden cry that came to his lips. He
had almost forgotten the most vital of all things. There was not time
to unlace his boots. With his knife he cut the laces in a single
downward thrust. Swiftly he freed his own feet, and Marette's. Even in
this hour of their peril it thrilled him to see how quickly Marette
responded to the thoughts that moved him. She tore at her outer
garments and slipped them off as he wriggled out of his heavy shirt. A
slim, white-underskirted little thing, her glorious hair flying in the
wind that came through the Chute, her throat and arms bare, her eyes
shining at Kent, she came again close within his arms, and her lips
framed softly his name. And a moment later she turned her face up, and
cried quickly,
"Kiss me, Jeems--kiss me--"
Her warm lips clung to his, and her bare arms encircled his neck with
the choking grip of a child's. He looked ahead and braced himself on
his feet, and after that he buried one of his hands in the soft mass of
her hair and pressed her face against his naked breast.
Ten seconds later the crash came. Squarely amidships the scow struck
the Dragon's Tooth. Kent was prepared for the shock, but his attempt to
hold his feet, with Marette in his arms, was futile. The bulwark saved
them from crashing against the slippery face of the rock itself. Amid
the roar of water that filled his ears he was conscious of the rending
of timbers. The scow bulged up with the mighty force beneath, and for a
second or two it seemed as though that force was going to overturn and
submerge it. Then slowly it began to slip off the nose of the rock.
Holding to the rail with one hand and clinging to Marette with his
other arm, Kent was gripped in the horror of what was happening. The
scow was slipping _into the right hand channel_! In that channel there
as no hope--only death.
Marette was squarely facing the thing ahead. In this hour when each
second held a lifetime of suspense Kent saw that she understood. Yet
she did not cry out. Her face was dead white. Her hair and arms and
shoulders were dripping with the splash of water. But she was not
terrified as he had seen terror. When she turned her eyes to him, he
was amazed by the quiet, calm look that was in them. Her lips trembled.
His soul expressed itself in a wordless cry that was drowned in another
crash of timber as a jutting snag of the Tooth crumpled up the little
cabin as if it had been pasteboard. He felt overwhelming him the surge
of a thing mightier than the menace of the Chute. He could not lose! It
was inconceivable. Impossible! With _her_ to fight for--this slim,
wonderful creature who smiled at him even as she saw death.
And then, as his arm closed still more tightly about her, the monsters
of power and death gave him their answer. The scow swung free of the
Dragon's Tooth, half-filled with water. Its cracked and broken carcass
was caught in the rock jaws of the eastern channel. It ceased to be a
floating thing. It was inundation, dissolution, utter obliteration
almost without shock. And Kent found himself in the thundering rush of
waters, holding to Marette.
For a space they were under. Black water and white froth fumed and
exploded over them. It seemed an age before fresh air filled Kent's
nostrils. He thrust Marette upward and cried out to her. He heard her
answer.
"I'm all right--Jeems!"
His swimming prowess was of little avail now. He was like a chip. All
his effort was to make of himself a barrier between Marette's soft body
and the rocks. It was not the water itself that he feared, but the
rocks.
There were scores and hundreds of them, like the teeth of a mighty
grinding machine. And the jaw was a quarter of a mile in length. He
felt the first shock, the second, the third. He was not thinking of
time or distance, but was fighting solely to keep himself between
Marette and death. The first time he failed, a blind sort of rage
burned in his brain.
He saw her white body strained over a slippery, deluge-worn rock. Her
head was flung back, and he saw the long masses of her hair streaming
out in the white froth, and he thought for an instant that her fragile
body had been broken. He fought still more fiercely after that. And she
knew for what he was fighting. Only in an unreal sort of way was he
conscious of shock and hurt. It gave him no physical pain. Yet he
sensed the growing dizziness in his head, an increasing lack of
strength in his arms and body.
They were halfway through the Chute when he shot against a rock with
terrific force. The contact tore Marette from him. He plunged for her,
missed his grip, and then saw her opposite him, clinging to the same
rock. The babiche rope had saved her. Fastened about her waist and tied
to his wrist, it still held them together--with the five feet of rock
between them.
Panting, their life half beaten out of them, their eyes met over that
rock. Now that he was out of the water, the blood began streaming from
Kent's arms and shoulders and face, but he smiled at her as a few
moments before she had smiled at him. Her eyes were filled with the
pain of his hurts. He nodded back in the direction from which they had
come.
"We're out of the worst of it," he tried to shout. "As soon as we've
got our wind, I will climb over the rock to you. It won't take us
longer than a couple of minutes, perhaps less, to make the quiet water
at the end of the channel."
She heard him and nodded her reply. He wanted to give her confidence.
And he had no intention of resting, for her position filled him with a
terror which he fought to hide. The babiche rope, not half as large
around as his little finger, had swung her to the downstream side of
the rock. It was the slender thread of buckskin and his own weight that
were holding her. If the buckskin should break--
He thanked God that it was the tough babiche that had been around his
pack. An inch at a time he began to draw himself up on the rock. The
undertow behind the rock had flung a mass of Marette's long hair toward
him, so that it was a foot or two nearer to him than her clinging
hands. He worked himself toward that, for he saw that he could reach it
more quickly than he could reach her. At the same time he had to keep
his end of the babiche taut. It was, from the beginning, an almost
superhuman task. The rock was slippery as oil. Twice his eyes shot
down-stream, with the thought that it might be better to cast himself
bodily into the water, and after that draw Marette to him by means of
the babiche. What he saw convinced him that such action would be fatal.
He must have Marette in his arms. If he lost her--even for a few
seconds--the life would be beaten from her body in that rock-strewn
maelstrom below.
And then, suddenly, the babiche cord about his wrist grew loose. The
reaction almost threw him back. With the loosening of it a cry came
from Marette. It all happened in an instant, in almost less time than
his brain could seize upon the significance of it--the slipping of her
hands from the rock, the shooting of her white body away from him in
the still whiter spume of the rapids, The rock had cut the babiche, and
she was gone! With a cry that was like the cry of a madman he plunged
after her. The water engulfed him. He twisted himself up, freeing
himself from the undertow. Twenty feet ahead of him--thirty--he caught
a glimpse of a white arm and then of Marette's face, before she
disappeared in a wall of froth.
Into that froth he shot after her. He came out of it blinded, groping
wildly for her, crying out her name. His fingers caught the end of the
babiche that was fastened about his own wrist, and he clutched it
savagely, believing for a moment that he had found her. Thicker and
more deadly the rocks of the lower passage rose in his way. They seemed
like living things, like devils filled with the desire to torture and
destroy. They struck and beat at him. Their laughter was the roar of a
Niagara. He no longer cried out. His brain grew heavy, and clubs were
beating him--beating and breaking him into a formless thing. The
rock-drifts of spume, lather-white, like the frosting of a monster
cake, turned gray and then black.
He did not know when he ceased fighting. The day went out. Night came.
The world was oblivion. And for a space he ceased to live.