“And get in range of him so he can kill me?” Ben replied savagely.  “Can’t you see he’s shooting at me?”

“Then throw up your hands—­it’s all some dreadful mistake.  Can’t you hear me—­turn and go back.”

The fifth and sixth shots were fired by now; and Neilson had gone to his cabin for his rifle.  Ben smiled grimly into her white face.

“We’d better keep on going to our landing place,” he advised.  “There’s no place to land above it—­I went all over the shore this morning.  That will give him time to cool down.  I only want to get around this curve before he comes with his rifle.”

She stared at him aghast, too confused and terrified to make rational answer.  He was pale, too; but she had a swift feeling that the cold, rugged face was in some way exultant, too.  The first chill of fear of him brushed her like a cold wind.

But they were around the bend by now, and Ben’s breath caught as if in a triumphant gasp.  Already all opportunity for the girl to swim to shore was irremediably past.  While he could still control the canoe with comparative ease, the river was a swift-moving sheet of water that would carry any one but the strongest swimmer remorselessly into the rapids below.  Ben smiled, like a man who has come into a great happiness, and rested on his paddle.

“Push into shore,” the girl urged.  “The home shore—­if you can.  Then I’ll go and find him and try to quiet him.  He’ll kill you if you don’t.”

A short pause followed the girl’s words.  The man smiled coldly into her eyes.

“He’ll kill me, will he?” he repeated.

The response to the simple question was simply unmitigated terror, swift and deadly, surging through the girl’s frame.  It caught and twisted her throat muscles like a cruel hand; and her childish eyes widened and darkened under his contemptuous gaze.

“What do you mean?” she asked breathlessly.  “What—­are you going to do?”

“He won’t kill me,” Ben went on.  “I may kill him—­and I will if I can—­but he won’t kill me.  See—­we’re going faster all the time.”

It was true.  Strokes of the paddle were no longer necessary to propel the craft at the breakneck pace.  It sped like an arrow—­straight toward the perilous cataracts below.

The girl watched him with transcending horror, and slowly the truth went home.  The supplies in the boat, her father’s desperate attempt to rescue her, even at the risk of her own life and the cost of Ben’s, this white, exultant face before her, more terrible than that of the wolf between, the cold reptile eyes so full of some unhallowed emotion,—­at last she saw their meaning and relation.  Was it death—­was that what this mad man in the stern had for her?  She remembered what she had told him the day before, her description of the cataracts that lay below.  She struggled to shake off the trance that her terror had cast about her.