Danny Royal was not an imaginative person.  He possessed, to be sure, the superstitions of the average horseman and gambler, and he believed strongly in hunches, but he was not fanciful and he put no faith in dreams and portents.  It bothered him exceedingly, therefore, to discover that he was weighed down by an unaccountable but extremely oppressive sense of apprehension.  How or why it had come to obsess him he could not imagine, but for some reason Miles Canon and the stormy waters below it had assumed terrible potentialities and he could not shake off the conviction that they were destined to prove his undoing.  This feeling he had allowed to grow until now a fatalistic apathy had settled upon him and his usual cheerfulness was replaced by a senseless irritability.  He suffered explosions of temper quite as surprising to the Kirbys, father and daughter, as to himself.  On the day of his arrival he was particularly ugly, wherefore Rouletta was impelled to remonstrate with him.

“What ails you, Danny?” she inquired.  “You’ll have our men quitting.”

“I wish they would,” he cried.  “Boatmen!  They don’t know as much about boats as me and Sam.”

“They do whatever they’re told.”

Royal acknowledged this fact ungraciously.  “Trouble is we don’t know what to tell ’em to do.  All Sam knows is ‘gee’ and ‘haw,’ and I can’t steer anything that don’t wear a bridle.  Why, if this river wasn’t fenced in with trees we’d have taken the wrong road and been lost, long ago.”

Rouletta nodded thoughtfully.  “Father is just as afraid of water as you are.  He won’t admit it, but I can tell.  It has gotten on his nerves and—­I’ve had hard work to keep him from drinking.”

“Say!  Don’t let him get started on that!” Danny exclaimed, earnestly.  “That would be the last touch.”

“Trust me.  I—­”

But Kirby himself appeared at that moment, having returned from a voyage of exploration.  Said he:  “There’s a good town below.  I had a chance to sell the outfit.”

“Going to do it?” Danny could not conceal his eagerness.

The elder man shook his gray head.  “Hardly.  I’m no piker.”

“I wish you and Danny would take the portage and trust the pilot to run the rapids,” Rouletta said.

Kirby turned his expressionless face upon first one then the other of his companions.  “Nervous?” he inquired of Royal.

The latter silently admitted that he was.

“Go ahead.  You and Letty cross afoot—­”

“And you?”

“Oh, I’m going to stick!” “Father—­” the girl began, but old Sam shook his head.

“No.  This is my case bet, and I’m going to watch it.”

Royal’s weazened face puckered until it resembled more than ever a withered apple.  “Then I’ll stick, too,” he declared.  “I never laid down on you yet, Sam.”

“How about you, Letty?”

The girl smiled.  “Why, I wouldn’t trust you boys out of my sight for a minute.  Something would surely happen.”