Holding to the rail with one hand and clinging to Marette with his other arm, Kent was gripped in the horror of what was happening.  The scow was slipping into the right hand channel!  In that channel there was no hope—­only death.

Marette was squarely facing the thing ahead.  In this hour when each second held a lifetime of suspense Kent saw that she understood.  Yet she did not cry out.  Her face was dead white.  Her hair and arms and shoulders were dripping with the splash of water.  But she was not terrified as he had seen terror.  When she turned her eyes to him, he was amazed by the quiet, calm look that was in them.  Her lips trembled.

His soul expressed itself in a wordless cry that was drowned in another crash of timber as a jutting snag of the Tooth crumpled up the little cabin as if it had been pasteboard.  He felt overwhelming him the surge of a thing mightier than the menace of the Chute.  He could not lose!  It was inconceivable.  Impossible!  With her to fight for—­this slim, wonderful creature who smiled at him even as she saw death.

And then, as his arm closed still more tightly about her, the monsters of power and death gave him their answer.  The scow swung free of the Dragon’s Tooth, half-filled with water.  Its cracked and broken carcass was caught in the rock jaws of the eastern channel.  It ceased to be a floating thing.  It was inundation, dissolution, utter obliteration almost without shock.  And Kent found himself in the thundering rush of waters, holding to Marette.

For a space they were under.  Black water and white froth fumed and exploded over them.  It seemed an age before fresh air filled Kent’s nostrils.  He thrust Marette upward and cried out to her.  He heard her answer.

“I’m all right—­Jeems!”

His swimming prowess was of little avail now.  He was like a chip.  All his effort was to make of himself a barrier between Marette’s soft body and the rocks.  It was not the water itself that he feared, but the rocks.

There were scores and hundreds of them, like the teeth of a mighty grinding machine.  And the jaw was a quarter of a mile in length.  He felt the first shock, the second, the third.  He was not thinking of time or distance, but was fighting solely to keep himself between Marette and death.  The first time he failed, a blind sort of rage burned in his brain.

He saw her white body strained over a slippery, deluge-worn rock.  Her head was flung back, and he saw the long masses of her hair streaming out in the white froth, and he thought for an instant that her fragile body had been broken.  He fought still more fiercely after that.  And she knew for what he was fighting.  Only in an unreal sort of way was he conscious of shock and hurt.  It gave him no physical pain.  Yet he sensed the growing dizziness in his head, an increasing lack of strength in his arms and body.