"That is all right, providing I get through. What if the boat gets tipped over or smashed in the ice?"
Chenault shrugged again. "You De-Man-Who-Cannot-Die," he said. "You got de good heart. In de woods all peoples know. You no mak' write. I got no penzil."
CHAPTER L
FACE TO FACE
Before daylight next morning the two men dragged the little flat boat to the water's edge. The river had risen to full flood during the night and out of the darkness came the crash and grind of ice, the dull roar and splash of undermined banks, and the purling rumble of swift moving water.
After breakfast Bill and Jeanne, armed with light spruce poles, took their places; Chenault pushed the boat into the current and it shot downstream, whirling in the grip of the flood.
There was no need for oars. Both Bill and the girl had their work cut out warding off from drifting ice cakes and the thrashing branches of uprooted trees.
Time and again they came within a hair's-breadth of destruction. The eddying, seething surface of the swift rushing river seemed to hurl its débris toward their little craft in fiendish malevolence. Ice cakes crashed together on every hand, water-logged tree-butts snagged them bow and stern, and the low-hanging limbs of "sweepers" clawed and tore at them like the teeth of a giant rake as they swept beneath, lying flat upon the bottom of the boat.
Bill grinned at the thought of a canoe. In the suck and swirl of the current the odds were heavily against even the stout flat boat's winning through.