“All set?” Bob cried as he pushed and leaped into the bow.
Almost immediately the swift current caught the frail craft and whirled it around until it was headed down stream.
Once out in the middle of the river the canoe needed no urging from the paddles and all Bob and the Indian had to do was to keep her straight and away from the rocks. And it was not long before Rex decided in his own mind that that was quite enough.
Now a big rock would loom up directly in their path and it would seem certain that they were going to hit it when Bob, by a slight movement of his paddle, would deflect their course just in time. And again Rex would shudder in spite of himself as he glanced over the side of the canoe and saw the jagged points of ledges seemingly only a few inches beneath the surface. Even he knew that it would need but a brush against those teeth to rip a large hole in the bottom of the canoe.
“And I sure would hate to have to try to swim ashore here,” he thought more than once.
He could tell by the rapidity with which the banks seemed to fly past that they must be making fully twenty-five miles an hour.
“If we should hit a good sized rock out here, that is big enough to stop the canoe all at once, our momentum might carry us all through the air to the shore and we wouldn’t have to swim,” he thought as they swept around a bend what seemed to him terrific speed.
The course of the stream had been to the east but the bend was nearly at right angles and now they were heading almost due north.
“I thought streams always ran toward the south,” he shouted turning his head.
“Not up here they don’t,” Jack laughed. “They’re apt to run any old way.”