The boat was half full of water.  Nas Ta Bega scooped out great sheets of it with his hands.  Shefford sprang to aid him, found the shovel, and plunged into the task.  Slowly but surely they emptied the boat.  And then Shefford saw that twilight had fallen.  Joe was working the craft toward a narrow bank of sand, to which, presently, they came, and the Indian sprang out to moor to a rock.

The fugitives went ashore and, weary and silent and drenched, they dropped in the warm sand.

But Shefford could not sleep.  The river kept him awake.  In the distance it rumbled, low, deep, reverberating, and near at hand it was a thing of mutable mood.  It moaned, whined, mocked, and laughed.  It had the soul of a devil.  It was a river that had cut its way to the bowels of the earth, and its nature was destructive.  It harbored no life.  Fighting its way through those dead walls, cutting and tearing and wearing, its heavy burden of silt was death, destruction, and decay.  A silent river, a murmuring, strange, fierce, terrible, thundering river of the desert!  Even in the dark it seemed to wear the hue of blood.

All night long Shefford heard it, and toward the dark hours before dawn, when a restless, broken sleep came to him, his dreams were dreams of a river of sounds.

All the beautiful sounds he knew and loved he heard—­the sigh of the wind in the pines, the mourn of the wolf, the cry of the laughing-gull, the murmur of running brooks, the song of a child, the whisper of a woman.  And there were the boom of the surf, the roar of the north wind in the forest, the roll of thunder.  And there were the sounds not of earth—­a river of the universe rolling the planets, engulfing the stars, pouring the sea of blue into infinite space.

Night with its fitful dreams passed.  Dawn lifted the ebony gloom out of the canyon and sunlight far up on the ramparts renewed Shefford’s spirit.  He rose and awoke the others.  Fay’s wistful smile still held its faith.  They ate of the gritty, water-soaked food.  Then they embarked.  The current carried them swiftly down and out of hearing of the last rapid.  The character of the river and the canyon changed.  The current lessened to a slow, smooth, silent, eddying flow.  The walls grew straight, sheer, gloomy, and vast.  Shefford noted these features, but he was listening so hard for the roar of the next rapid that he scarcely appreciated them.  All the fugitives were listening.  Every bend in the canyon—­and now the turns were numerous—­might hold a rapid.  Shefford strained his ears.  He imagined the low, dull, strange rumble.  He had it in his ears, yet there was the growing sensation of silence.

“Shore this ’s a dead place,” muttered Lassiter.

“She’s only slowed up for a bigger plunge,” replied Joe.  “Listen!  Hear that?”

But there was no true sound, Joe only imagined what he expected and hated and dreaded to hear.