She held her paddle poised again. The canoe came back to midway of the green path. The Valdez shore flew by, stubs of trees, tall cedars with lancelike crests and drooping boughs. A gull swooped over them, crying. The swiftness made a cool breeze in their faces, flung the girl's hair in a loose brown cloud about her head.
The high, carved bow dipped into broken water, among cross-surges. They rode over "boils,"—deflecting currents that shot up from the depths and broke into strange watery mounds with a sinister muttering. They shipped a little spray, rolled uncertainly in this agitation. Then they were through, floating in a great eddy that swept them back toward Little Dent. They had shot the rapids.
Mary looked over her shoulder. They smiled at each other in perfect understanding, and young Norquay thought:
"I'd like to take old Spence through. He wouldn't grin. Poor old duffer, he gets all his fun second-hand—out of books."
Aloud he said, "We'd better get under the Dent shore before the eddy carries us back among the swirls."
"Among the Devil's Dishpans, you mean," she laughed, keeping stroke with him. "That's what daddy calls them."
"Good name," he grunted. "They're devil's something when they get to spinning good. Paddle, Brownie. We're losing ground."
They got in under the weedy shore of Little Dent and worked up to the overfall. They got ashore. Rod took a light line from the bow and hauled. Mary held the canoe off with a slender pole. Thus they worked their craft up over the jump-off and reached the northern side of the small island where the flood tide parted and where its sweep was slow. Then they reëmbarked and stood clear, paddling in a wide detour until they drove into the straight current again and were swept down like a gaudy arrow.
Close on their heels as they made the second voyage came a white power cruiser, all agleam in the afternoon sun, her housework varnished oak, bright flashes reflected off polished brass and copper. She plowed down the green spillway, her bow wave spreading like an ostrich plume. When Rod and Mary skilfully picked smooths in the broken water and swung aside into the comparative calm of the great eddy the white cruiser followed and hauled up close to them.
Out her pilot-house window a capped, red face grinned genially. On her low after deck half a dozen people sat in wicker chairs, the women in cool summer stuff, the men in flannels and colored sweaters. A girl about Mary Thorn's age, a fair-haired, blue-eyed creature like a bisque doll, stood with one arm around the slender signal mast. A little below her a tall young man with the reddish-brown hair and fine clear skin and grayish-blue eyes of the boy in the canoe leaned over the pipe rail.