Adventure Magazine Cover, April 3, 1918 — page 25: what you’re looking at

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

Ambush paddles in a terrific drive. The great canoe leaped its own length like a spurred horse and sheered off into mid-river. “Stop!” Wayne bellowed. ‘‘Rapide des Boisfranc’s just below. You can’t run it. It’s never been run. By the Doom, before you'll drown my girl I’1!——” He broke off to snatch a rifle from the hands of the nearest man and level it at the canoe. “‘Carlisle—stop! like a skunk!” But at the menace of the rifle muzzle Joan sitting on Carlisle’s left hand, sprang up as a shield between. “Father, don’t fire,” she implored. forget—you forget!’ “T forget nothing. Sit down, girl—sit down, I say.” Joan did not sit down, but a lurch of the canoe in the eddies set her swaying so that Carlisle pulled her down. ‘The action put their bodies out of line where they sat, and instantly Wayne’s rifle cracked. Carlisle heard the rip of the puncturing ball through the canoe from side to side above the water- line, and at the same moment he felt a solid blow, like the thud of a stone, on his left leg below the knee. Blankly surprised, he looked down, to see the calf of his high-cut deerskin moccasin punctured from side to side as neatly as the birch-bark skin of the canoe. Blood was spreading over his leg and trickling down the creamy deerskin to his ankle. Hastily he thrust the wounded limb under a dun- nage bag before Joan should see. Missowa twisted the stern and flung the craft cleanly across the river bend so that a rock shoulder intercepted Wayne’s line of fire. They were round the bend, swinging into the grip of the powerful, tugging cur- rent writhing down to Rapide des Boisfranc. Wayne’s Free-Traders had hidden their own canoes in the forest below the rapid, ready for hasty flight when they crept up the shore to spoil Richelieu’s ambuscade. Now those in the racing Factor’s canoe could hear them clamoring as they crashed along over the mile portage in a vain at- tempt to overtake the craft before it could reach white water. “Oh, my father shouldn’t have fired that way,’ censured Joan, still unaware of Carlisle’s wound, “‘for he might have killed you, Paul! He’s not himself. I swear he’s Stop, or I'll shoot you “Vou not himself. He’s mad with an enmity I’ve never seen him hold before—with a hate that’s quite beyond me!”’ “Yt know,’ nodded Carlisle, turning a grimace of pain into a smile, “and you see how impossible it was for me to let myself be taken prisoner. I’m sorry, Joan, to have to hurl you through these infernal rapids, but it can’t be helped now. We can’t stop to land you. You'll have to hold on tightly and keep your weight as low as possible. Now, take your grip. Yonder’s white water ahead!’ WITH terrific speed they were shooting down the black, ominous surges at the head of the rapids, surges twisting and writhing like a brood of mighty pythons between the crowding walls of rock. Fast as the river ran, the craft was running faster, flung bodily ahead of the mad current by the desperate paddles of Waseyawin, Missowa and the four middle men. Not for an instant might they allow the river’s velocity to approximate the canoe’s velocity, because in that instant control would be lost to their blades and disaster ensue. ; Half a dozen canoe lengths from the foam- ing snarl of white water the bowsman, Waseyawin, gave a high-pitched yell as a signal. At his cry the tremendous speed of the paddle strokes abruptly doubled till it seemed some deep magic and not the skill of men which plied blades that the quick eye could scarcely follow. The canoe was fairly torn from the suck of the dark water and launched like a meteor through the white. Waseyawin gave another yell. As one man the four middlemen shipped paddles, leaving Wase- yawin and Missowa, standing at bow and stern, to twist the huge craft this way or that. Waseyawin, eyes focused on the moil below, read the river as white men read a book, and ever his high-pitched yells split the tumult of the waters, drifting back to Missowa in the stern, telegraphing him what lay ahead—tossing billow, seething white water, angry eddy, treacherous cross current, fountained spray that marked the jagged rock or shallow foam that masked the sunken boulder. Through a mist of flying drops they , rocked over the edge of the cascade proper and plunged sheer down a milk-white chute as steep as a flight of stairs. COnniclooolkxs (C@