For the first time since the canoe journey had begun, he looked beyond the darkly glowing head and the slender figure in the bow.  It was a splendid night.  Ahead of him the river was like a rippling sheet of molten silver.  On both sides, a quarter of a mile apart, rose the walls of the forest, like low-hung, oriental tapestries.  The sky seemed near, loaded with stars, and the moon, rising with almost perceptible movement toward the zenith, had changed from red to a mellow gold.  Carrigan’s soul always rose to this glory of the northern light.  Youth and vigor, he told himself, must always exist under those unpolluted lights of the upper worlds, the unspeaking things which had told him more than he had ever learned from the mouths of other men.  They stood for his religion, his faith, his belief in the existence of things greater than the insignificant spark which animated his own body.  He appreciated them most when there was stillness.  And tonight it was still.  It was so quiet that the trickling of the paddles was like subdued music.  From the forest there came no sound.  Yet he knew there was life there, wide-eyed, questing life, life that moved on velvety wing and padded foot, just as he and Marie-Anne and the half-breed Bateese were moving in the canoe.  To have called out in this hour would have taken an effort, for a supreme and invisible Hand seemed to have commanded stillness upon the earth.

And then there came droning upon his ears a break in the stillness, and as he listened, the shores closed slowly in, narrowing the channel until he saw giant masses of gray rock replacing the thick verdure of balsam, spruce, and cedar.  The moaning grew louder, and the rocks climbed skyward until they hung in great cliffs.  There could be but one meaning to this sudden change.  They were close to le Saint-esprit RAPIDE—­the Holy Ghost Rapids.  Carrigan was astonished.  That day at noon he had believed the Holy Ghost to be twenty or thirty miles below him.  Now they were at its mouth, and he saw that Bateese and Jeanne Marie-Anne Boulain were quietly and unexcitedly preparing to run that vicious stretch of water.  Unconsciously he gripped the gunwales of the canoe with both hands as the sound of the rapids grew into low and sullen thunder.  In the moonlight ahead he could see the rock walls closing in until the channel was crushed between two precipitous ramparts, and the moon and stars, sending their glow between those walls, lighted up a frothing path of water that made Carrigan hold his breath.  He would have portaged this place even in broad day.

He looked at the girl in the bow.  The slender figure Was a little more erect, the glowing head held a little higher.  In those moments he would have liked to see her face, the wonderful something that must be in her eyes as she rode fearlessly into the teeth of the menace ahead.  For he could see that she was not afraid, that she was facing this thing with a sort of exultation, that there was something