“That he wouldn’t; the Sergeant is a man of feeling, and many is the march and the fight that we have had —­ stood shoulder to shoulder in, as he would call it —­ though I always keep my limbs free when near a Frencher or a Mingo.”

“You are, then, the young friend of whom my father has spoken so often in his letters?”

“His young friend —­ the Sergeant has the advantage of me by thirty years; yes, he is thirty years my senior, and as many my better.”

“Not in the eyes of the daughter, perhaps, friend Pathfinder;” put in Cap, whose spirits began to revive when he found the water once more flowing around him.  “The thirty years that you mention are not often thought to be an advantage in the eyes of girls of nineteen.”

Mabel colored; and, in turning aside her face to avoid the looks of those in the bow of the canoe, she encountered the admiring gaze of the young man in the stern.  As a last resource, her spirited but soft blue eyes sought refuge in the water.  Just at this moment a dull, heavy sound swept up the avenue formed by the trees, borne along by a light air that hardly produced a ripple on the water.

“That sounds pleasantly,” said Cap, pricking up his ears like a dog that hears a distant baying; “it is the surf on the shores of your lake, I suppose?”

“Not so —­ not so,” answered the Pathfinder; “it is merely this river tumbling over some rocks half a mile below us.”

“Is there a fall in the stream?” demanded Mabel, a still brighter flush glowing in her face.

“The devil!  Master Pathfinder, or you, Mr. Eau-douce” (for so Cap began to style Jasper), “had you not better give the canoe a sheer, and get nearer to the shore?  These waterfalls have generally rapids above them, and one might as well get into the Maelstrom at once as to run into their suction.”

“Trust to us, friend Cap,” answered Pathfinder; “we are but fresh-water sailors, it is true, and I cannot boast of being much even of that; but we understand rifts and rapids and cataracts; and in going down these we shall do our endeavors not to disgrace our edication.”

“In going down!” exclaimed Cap.  “The devil, man! you do not dream of going down a waterfall in this egg shell of bark!”

“Sartain; the path lies over the falls, and it is much easier to shoot them than to unload the canoe and to carry that and all it contains around a portage of a mile by hand.”

Mabel turned her pallid countenance towards the young man in the stern of the canoe; for, just at that moment, a fresh roar of the fall was borne to her ears by a new current of the air, and it really sounded terrific, now that the cause was understood.

“We thought that, by landing the females and the two Indians,” Jasper quietly observed, “we three white men, all of whom are used to the water, might carry the canoe over in safety, for we often shoot these falls.”