“It’s Timmie.”
The raft and the man had disappeared at once beyond a bend in the river; yet there was now ground for hope. And here they were still driving their boat forward, still hoping that before disaster befell that aged recluse and his crazy craft, they might overtake him and save him from a terrible death. For, should they fail, disaster from crowding ice, rushing rapids and the mad spring upheaval must surely overtake him.
“And he once saved my life,” said Gordon Duncan. “We may have been hasty, followed him too far. It’s too late to think of that now. We can only follow on.”
The journey thus far had been exciting, but quite safe. There was a wild charm about it all, the racing water, the black, brown and green of fleeting landscape, the occasional flocks of wild ducks that shot by them, and the smell of spring everywhere charmed the young Scotch girl.
Yet it was dangerous. They might meet disaster at any turn. Her grandfather had told Faye this, and she believed it. The water they passed over at first had seemed white. That was because the winter ice still lay still beneath the surface water that had rushed down from hills and mountains.
“If it should rise beneath us!” she said with a shudder.
When, after a half hour of dreamy half-sleeping, she looked at the water, it was black.
“Ice has gone out down here,” her grandfather explained.
“Then we are safe?”
“Far from it. The ice before us may jam at any point. It will then pile mountain high. If there are steep banks as here, we will face disaster.”