"If we hear the patrol before we reach the Chute, we'll still have time to run ashore," he assured her. "And they won't catch us. We'll be harder to find than two needles in a haystack. But it's best to be prepared."
So he brought out his pack and Marette's smaller bundle, and laid his rifle and pistol holster across them.
It was three o'clock when the character of the river began to change, and Kent smiled happily. They were entering upon swifter waters. There were places where the channel narrowed, and they sped through rapids. Only where unbroken straight waters stretched out ahead of them did Kent give his arms a rest at the sweep. And through most of the straight water he added to the speed of the scow. Marette helped him. In him the exquisite thrill of watching her slender, glorious body as it worked with his own never grew old. She laughed at him over the big oar between them. The wind and sun played riot in her hair. Her parted lips were rose-red, her cheeks flushed, her eyes like sun-warmed rock violets. More than once, in the thrill of that afternoon flight, as he looked at the marvelous beauty of her, he asked himself if it could be anything but a dream. And more than once he laughed joyously, and paused in his swinging of the sweep, and proved that it was real and true. And Kent thanked God, and worked harder.
Once, a long time ago, Marette told him, she had been through the Chute. It had horrified her then. She remembered it as a sort of death monster, roaring for its victims. As they drew nearer to it, Kent told her more about it. Only now and then was a life lost there now, he said. At the mouth of the Chute there was a great, knife-like rock, like a dragon's tooth, that cut the Chute into two roaring channels. If a scow kept to the left-hand channel it was safe. There would be a mighty roaring and thundering as it swept on its passage, but that roaring of the Chute, he told her, was like the barking of a harmless dog.
Only when a scow became unmanageable, or hit the Dragon's Tooth, or made the right-hand channel instead of the left, was there tragedy. There was that delightful little note of laughter in Marette's throat when Kent told her that.
"You mean, Jeems, that if one of three possible things doesn't happen, we'll get through safely?"
"None of them is possible—with us," he corrected himself quickly. "We've a tight little scow, we're not going to hit the rock, and we'll make the left-hand channel so smoothly you won't know when it happens." He smiled at her with splendid confidence. "I've been through it a hundred times," he said.
He listened. Then, suddenly, he drew out his watch. It was a quarter of four. Marette's ears caught what he heard. In the air was a low, trembling murmur. It was growing slowly but steadily. He nodded when she looked at him, the question in her eyes.
"The rapids at the head of the Chute!" he cried, his voice vibrant with joy. "We've beat them out. WE'RE SAFE!"
They swung around a bend, and the white spume of the rapids lay half a mile ahead of them. The current began to race with them now. Kent put his whole weight on the sweep to keep the scow in mid-channel.