Adventure Magazine Cover, April 3, 1918 — page 26: what you’re looking at

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

24 Nerved as she was by her father’s training against all Northland menaces, Joan felt her spirit quaking at the sickening drop. Nau- sea dulled her senses. Terror gripped her heart. She shrank from the roaring brutal maw of the river, shrank from its slaver and fangs, pressing tremblingly closer and closer to Carlisle. “My God—my God,” she quavered as they struck the base swells of the cascade with a tearing sound like the ripping of a thousand yards of silk, “are we gone, Paul?” “No, Joan, we’re all right,” Carlisle soothed. ‘‘We’ll go through. If I hadn’t full faith in my Indians, do you think I would have risked it with you?” He loosened his grip and like a child he drew her shrinking body into the hollow of his arms. “T wouldn’t have risked it, Joan,” he de- clared. “I haven’t found you that long to lose you so soon. Don’t you understand, girl? Can’t you realize what finding you back there at Grande Portage has meant to me?” The frightened face upturned to his, the face blanched of its customary color, lost the rigidity of terror, grew mellow, warm, sprayed with its crimson again, and her eyes deepened under some potent emotion to an amethyst shade. In the grip of the colos- sal elemental forces, heaving through a boil- ing caldron on the edge of death, her feminine finesse that under other circum- stances would have kept him at bay, tan- talized, in doubt, was torn away and to her lips of no denial, Carlisle on wild impulse suddenly pressed his own. A barrel of water shipped over the bow when the canoe buried its nose in the grand swell drenched them both as it rolled from end to end. “Bail!” Carlisle commanded the middle- men. With a mighty trembling the canoe shook itself free and, aided by the increased buoy- ancy as the shipped water was flung out, rose upon the silver-gray backs of the swells, tobogganed down a series of fluid ter- races and shot between two madly-gyrating whirlpools studded with stump-like rocks. Once more Waseyawin uttered a violent yell. The four paddles of the middlemen came down into the swirl, and though the giant tentacles of the twin maelstroms gripped and tore at the craft like the arms Adventure of a gigantic devil-fish, the added impetus carried them through. They were in the leaping, lashing billows near the end of the rapids. A few more strokes meant calmer water, but squarely in the path showed a half-sunken boulder, round, wave-worn, dark-green in color, standing like some Titan warrior of old taking upon his bruised face the eternal hammering of the river! Swiftly Waseyawin jabbed his paddle deep under the bow to swing wide, but the already strained paddle snapped like a dead branch in his hands. The head of the canoe swerved back toward the rock. Missowa the steersman, taking the opposite stroke to Waseyawin’s, in the pivotal shift, could not throw the stern ’round far enough to clear, and before the middleman behind Waseyawin could hand him his paddle in place of the broken one, the craft reared upon the boulder. A grating sound ran along the bottom, and the thin birch-bark heaved in the cen- ter. All in a flash they lodged, whirled half-way ’round, were spewed off, to bring up with a drifting smash among a litter of granite blocks lying like thrown dice in the shore shallows. The canoe pitched on its side, spilling its occupants headforemost into the rubble-filled pools, and the first ones out of the tangle were Waseyawin and Missowa. Crying to their middlemen to salve the canoe, packs and arms, they rushed to the aid of the whites. Father Andrews, in water to his waist and weighted by his soaked cassock, was slowly making his way ashore. Carlisle lay motionless in a foot of water, his head upon a stone, with Joan bending over him. ‘“He’s stunned,” she gasped as Missowa and Waseyawin reached her. ‘See the bruise there on his temple? His leg is hurt and bleeding as well. Carry him ashore quickly.” For answer Missowa whipped the gay sash from his waist over her mouth, while Waseyawin seized her wrists and tied them behind her back with the fillet from his head. “Be quick, my Cree brother,’ urged Missowa, deftly knotting the gag. “The Free-Trading men must not find us here.” He pushed the girl up the bank in Wase- yawin’s charge and, exerting all his lithe strength, raised the limp form of the Factor COnniclooo SS (C@