Adventure, August 1917 — page 58: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

56 was a risky one. If Wallace were coming up the river, even now behind the high rock, she could do nothing. Debating as to whether to rush on openly or continue to creep along the shore and gain gradually, she forced her canoe on down the bay. Louis was now almost at the rock and she was no more than two hundred yards behind. When he turned he might see her, but she took that chance, knowing that the current would aid her by occupying the man’s attention as he swept around into the new channel. Breathlessly Joan watched and paddled. Louis was at the rock. The current gripped his canoe. He moved faster, flashed on close to the high cliff and was gone. Instantly Joan shoved her canoe out from the shore and straight at the opening which had swallowed the other. Her slower pace had given her an opportunity to recover her strength and breath and now she drove her craft out to where the current would first grasp it and aid her. The speed of the water increased and she, too, was whirled around into the narrow gorge behind the cliff. Less than fifty yards ahead, watching the shores closely, paddled the breed. Joan was about to call, to drop her paddle for the rifle, when she saw a movement on the ridge at the end of the gorge. Louis, too, had seen it and was creeping along the western shore, his rifle before him against a thwart. Joan watched the hillside and caught the flash of a white shirt. It was Wallace she knew, and _ instinc- tively she paddled faster. Louis was near the shore, but she was in the center, in full force of the current, and the distance between them diminished rapidly. There was no other movement on the hillside. Joan, watching for it, forgot Louis, forgot her own canoe, only driving it on unconsciously. And then—dashing down the steep bank and bursting through the brush directly in front of her and at the bend of the river,— Wallace Searles rushed into the open, halting at the very brink of the stream. At the same instant Louis dropped his paddle to the bottom of the canoe and picked up his rifle. The man he had been sent to kill, the man who, he had been made to believe, had discovered his destruction of the old river and would send him to prison for life, was before him, not more Adventure than forty yards away. His drug-inflamed mind knew only one purpose, and in- stantly his rifle went to his shoulder. The sudden appearance of Wallace on the river-bank, the sudden action of the breed, had left Joan without a plan. She called out sharply, at the same time reaching for the rifle before her. It snapped to her shoulder more quickly than had the breed’s, and her aim was more instantaneous because her skill was greater. No sooner was the weapon level than it leaped again from the recoil. A cry came from Louis and his own rifle dropped into the canoe. With his left hand he grasped his right elbow and rocked back and forth in pain. The bullet had struck where Joan had intended it should strike. The man was disabled. But instantly she saw that she might as well have aimed at a vital spot. She dropped her own rifle and picked up the paddle, but before the first stroke had been taken she knew that she could do nothing. Louis realized his danger at the same instant. With his left arm he tried to paddle to shore. He held the blade awk- wardly, pulled with it ineffectually, but the current had gripped him at the edge of the falls and there was no hope. While Joan and Wallace watched, his canoe shot out over the edge and disappeared. CHAPTER XVII ““NORTH IS NORTH”’ OAN’S canoe had been so close to Louis’s when she had fired that it, too, was caught in the last rush of the current. As the breed’s craft dipped over the edge into the crushing torrent below she saw her own danger and at once exchanged rifle for paddle. A few strokes and she drew up to the bank in front of Wallace. _ ‘“‘T never meant to do that,” she said as she looked at the engineer. “I never thought about the current and the falls.” Wallace was staring at her with some- thing of amazement, something akin to horror, in his eyes. “Vou shouldn’t have shot!” he exclaimed. ‘Why, Joan, it’s horrible for you to have such a thing on your conscience. I would rather have taken my chances than have you do such a thing.” “What!’? she demanded in wide-eyed CoOmiclsoo CO 5}