“Good,” replied the Governor.  “You can depend on me, Bob.”  His Excellency knelt low on his heels forward of the bow thwart.  Bob knelt high, with the stern thwart just catching his seat.  He felt his strong ashen paddle carefully, stowed an extra blade “handy,” said, “Now, then,” and the little canoe shot out into the middle of the placid river.  Far in the distance the rapids frothed and curled, their song rippling backwards like a beckoning hand.  On either side fir forests crowded to the rocky edges, that broke like cruel granite jaws against the waters.  Immediately ahead the stream twisted into circles, those smooth, deadly circles that herald the coming tumult.  Bob’s strong young arms grew taut, their sinews like thin cords of steel.  There was not a tremor in his entire body.  He knelt, steady and calm, his keen, narrow eyes fixed plumb ahead, alert and shrewd as an animal.  He felt his fingers grip the paddle with a strength that was vise-like, grip, and cling, and command.  The canoe obeyed even his thought, obeyed the turn of his smallest finger, obeyed, steadied itself, stood motionless for a second, then lifted its nose and plunged forward.  The spray split in two, showering the gunwales, then roared abaft, and—­they were in the thick of the fight.

“Do you want me to paddle?” shouted back Lord Dunbridge.

“No, I can pilot her all right,” came the response through the wind that almost shrieked Bob’s voice away.  The rocky ledges of shores were crowding closer now.  The firs, dark and melancholy, were frowning down; sharp crags arose like ragged teeth; to right, to left, ahead, and between them the river boiled and lashed itself into fury, pitching headlong on and on down the throat of the yawning channel.  The tiny canoe flung between the rocks like a shuttle.  Twice its keel shivered, rabbit-wise, in the force of crossing currents; once, far above the tumult, came a wild, anxious voice from the shore, but neither Bob nor his passenger gave heed.  The dash of that wildcat rapid left no second of time for replying or turning one’s eyelid; it was one long, breathless, hurling plunge, that got into their blood like a fever.  Then presently the riot seemed all behind them.  The savage music of the river grew fainter and fainter, the canoe slipped through the exhausted waters silently as a snake.  A moment more, and the bow beached on a strip of yellow sand, secure, steadfast, triumphant.  The glorious cruise was over.

A little group of scared, white-faced men huddled together on shore, the handsome young aide-de-camp reaching down his eager hands, which shook with anxiety.  “Oh, Your Excellency,” he exclaimed, “how could you run such a risk, and with only this boy to pilot you?”

“Bob and I ran away,” said Lord Dunbridge, as, breathless but happy, he sprang from the canoe.  “We ran away for a little holiday just by ourselves.  I would not have missed it for the world.”  Then, more seriously, he added, “Gentlemen, if I could think that my Prime Minister and the Government at Ottawa could steer the Ship of State as splendidly as Bobbie steered that canoe, I would never have another wrinkle on my forehead or another grey hair on my head.”