Wabi gave a terrific lunge with his paddle and the cone of a black rock hissed past half a canoe length away.

“It’s as black as a dungeon ahead, and I can hear rocks!” he shouted.  “Bring her in if you can, Muky, bring her in!”

There came the sudden sharp crack of snapping wood and a low exclamation of alarm fell from Mukoki.  His paddle had broken at the shaft.  In a flash Rod realized what had happened and passed back his own, but that moment’s loss of time proved almost fatal.  Freed of its guiding hand the birch bark swung broadside to the current, and at the same time Wabi’s voice rose in a shrill cry of warning.

“It’s not rocks, it’s a whirlpool!” he yelled.  “The other shore, swing her out, swing her out!”

He dug his own paddle deep down into the racing current and from behind Mukoki exerted his most powerful efforts, but it was too late!  A hundred feet ahead the stream tore between two huge rocks as big as houses, and just beyond these Rod caught a glimpse of frothing water churning itself milk-white in the moonlight.  But it was only a glimpse.  With a velocity that was startling the canoe shot between the rocks, and as a choking sea of spray leaped into their faces Wabigoon’s voice came back again in a loud command for the others to hang to the gunwales of their frail craft.  For an instant, in which his thoughts seemed to have left him, a roaring din filled Rod’s ears; a white, churning mist hid everything but his own arms and clutching hands, and then the birch bark darted with the sudden impetus of a freshly-shot arrow around the jagged edge of the boulder—­and he could see again.

Here was the whirlpool!  More than once Wabi had told him of these treacherous traps, made by the mountain streams, and of the almost certain death that awaited the unlucky canoe man drawn into their smothering embrace.  There was no angry raging of the flood here; at first it seemed to Rod that they were floating almost without motion upon a black, lazy sea that made neither sound nor riffle.  Scarce half a dozen canoe lengths away he saw the white center of the maelstrom, and there came to his ears above the dash of the stream between the two great rocks a faint hissing sound that curdled the blood in his veins, the hissing of the treacherous undertow that would soon drag them to their death!  In the passing of a thought there flashed into the white youth’s mind a story that Mukoki had told him of an Indian who had been lost in one of these whirlpools of the spring floods, and whose body had been tossed and pitched about in its center for more than a week.  For the first time the power of speech came to him.

“Shall we jump?” he shouted.

“Hang to the canoe.”

Wabi fairly shrieked the words, and yet as he spoke he drew himself half erect, as if about to leap into the flood.  The momentum gathered in its swift rush between the rocks had carried their frail craft almost to the outer edge of the deadly trap, and as this momentum ceased and the canoe yielded to the sucking forces of the maelstrom the young Indian shrieked out his warning again.