He would have said more, but his companion had nodded to him as he had ended the sentence, for they had come to the last flight of the rapids, and the great pool lay glimmering through the branches of the trees below.

The old man knew what was meant and said:  “I know it, boy, I know it.  Take the east run, for the water be deeper that way, and the boat sets deep.  I won’t trouble ye, for ye know the way.  Lord! how the water biles!  Now’s yer time, boy,—­to the right with ye! to the right!  Sweep her round and let her go!”

Away and downward swept the boat.  The strong eddies caught it, but the controlling paddle was stronger than the eddies and kept it to the line of its safest descent.  Past rocks that stood in mid current, against which the swift-going water beat and dashed—­past mossy banks and shadowed curves where the great eddies whirled—­down over miniature falls into bubbles and froth the light craft swept, and with a final plunge and leap jumped the last cascade, and, darting out into the great basin, ran shoreward.

It touched the beach, and the trapper and Herbert rose to their feet; but for a moment neither stirred, for in front of them, not thirty feet away, at the line where the sand and the green mosses met, and looking directly at them, stood a man and a girl!

* * * * *

WHO WAS HE?  The two men asked this question a thousand times mentally in the next two months, and once afterward they asked it aloud, as they looked into each other’s eyes across a grave.  But to the question, whether spoken or silent, no answer ever came.

The world has its enigmas, and he was one.

Amid the jabbering crowd we chaff and chatter with, we meet occasionally a man who never chaffs nor chatters,—­a man who sees all things; perhaps because of this, suffers all things, but says nothing at all.  The sphinxes are still extant.  The old time ones were of stone and bronze; the modern ones are of flesh and blood; that’s all the difference.  Nay, not quite all; for the secrets that the ancients held smothered within the folds of their stony silence were only such as nature revealed to them from her desert posts,—­the secrets of sunrises and starry nights and simoons that swept the sandy plain and of civilizations, the murmurs of whose rising and the crash of whose sudden overthrow, they needs must hear.  But the secrets that men hear today, and by hearing of which are made silent, are the secrets of lives being lived, of hearts being broken, of intentions so noble and failures so bitter as to make men sceptical whether God keeps watch over the passing events on the earth.