Eliza Appleton came stumbling back over the rock-strewn bank, for during that first mad plunge she had seen O’Neil go down beneath one of the rearing craft.  A man was helping him out.

“Nothing but my ankle!” he reassured her when she reached his side.  “I was dragged a bit and jammed among the boulders.”  He sank down, and his lips were white with pain, but his gray eyes smiled bravely.  The boatman removed his chief’s boot and fell to rubbing the injury, while the girls looked on helplessly.

“Come, come!  We can’t stay here,” Murray told them.  He drew on the boot again to check the swelling.

“Can you walk?” they asked him, anxiously.

“Certainly!  Two feet are really unnecessary.  A man can get along nearly as well on one.”  He hurried his men back to their tasks, and managed to limp after them, although the effort brought beads of sweat to his lips and brow.

It was well that he insisted upon haste, for they had not gone far when the glacier broke abreast of the spot they had just left.  There came a rending crack, terrifying in its loudness; a tremendous tower of ice separated itself from the main body, leaned slowly outward, then roared downward, falling in a solid piece like a sky-scraper undermined.  Not until the arc described by its summit had reached the river’s surface did it shiver itself.  Then there was a burst as of an exploded mine.  The saffron waters of the Salmon shot upward until they topped the main rampart, and there separated into a cloud of spray which rained down in a deluge.  Out from the fallen mass rushed a billow which gushed across the channel, thrashed against the high bank, then inundated it until the alder thickets on its crest whipped their tips madly.  A giant charge of fragments of every size flew far out across the flats or lashed the waters to further anger in its fall.

The prostrate column lay like a wing-dam, half across the stream, and over it the Salmon piled itself.  Disintegration followed; bergs heaved themselves into sight and went rolling and lunging after the billow which was rushing down-stream with the speed of a locomotive.  They ground and clashed together in furious confusion as the river spun them; the greater ones up-ended themselves, casting off muddy cascades.  From the depths of the flood came a grinding and crunching as ice met rock.

Spellbound, the girls watched that first wave go tearing out of sight, filling the river bank-full.  With exclamations of wonder, they saw the imprisoned waters break the huge dam to pieces.  Finally the last shattered fragment was hurried out of sight, the flood poured past unhampered, and overhead the glacier towered silent, unchanged, staring at them balefully like a blind man with filmed eyes.  There remained nothing but a gleaming scar to show where the cataclysm had originated.

“If I’d known the river was so high I’d never have brought you,” O’Neil told them.  “It’s fortunate we happened to be above that break.  You see, the waves can’t run up against the current.”  He turned to his men and spurred them on.