Jean Baptiste Chabrier listened, with an odd gleam in his dark, quiet eyes, to the roaring of the rapids. A dangerous place, those rapids! Who knew better than Jean Baptiste, who for three years had made his home within the sound of Assin-nebah's voice? Assin-nebah—that was as the Crees said it; "rocky water" it meant in the English.
Chabrier's mild and thoughtful gaze rested upon the figure of the girl seated in the middle of the canoe. He could not see her face, for she was looking ahead, just as he was. There had been a time when she would have faced Jean Baptiste, her husband; but now she looked toward the man in the bow—big, blond, gay Les Walters, the sawyer.
For just an instant the odd gleam in Jean Baptiste's eyes flamed up angrily. In the previous spring he had invited Les, who had never killed a moose, to come up to his camp in the hunting season. Les had accepted, and now he was here. He had been here for ten days, or perhaps more. Jean Baptiste did not keep accurate check of the time. It seemed many days—too many days.
Jean Baptiste had seen what had happened, for his eyes were sharp with love. It was a fool who said that love is blind. Love lends a jealous keenness to the vision, and Jean Baptiste was very much in love with his pretty wife. That was why he knew that she was falling in love with Les Walters.
The big sawyer was everything that Jean Baptiste was not. Les was tall and blond and smiling, full of br quick jests and subtle flatterings. Jean Baptiste was small, for all his strength, and dark and grave. He spoke softly and infrequently, and his adoration for Charlotte was in his heart and in his eyes, not upon his tongue.
Les was a y, and Charlotte was a woman. To Jean Baptiste, in whom stirred the romantic blood of the gay voyageurs, there was given a certain understanding of women. He knew their love of that which is new and different.
He had not blamed Charlotte. He had merely waited until he was sure she would be ready to decide between her husband and the other man; and now they were coming swiftly to the place where, ready or not, the woman must make her decision, instantly, once and for all.
The rapids were close ahead. The roar of the tortured waters filled the air. The high flung spray hung in swirling clouds of wind-whipped mist. Already the canoe was in the grip of the current. The water was black and waveless, and fretted with odd, ever changing cross currents and eddies. It writhed and twisted as if it knew and dreaded the granite-fanged monster that waited just ahead.
Les, in the bow, glanced back nervously. They had shot the rapids several times before, but the thunder of the angry waters still held a menace for the sawyer. Jean Baptiste smiled grimly and motioned briefly for Les to draw in his paddle. Then the little bushman stood up for an instant in the canoe and surveyed the stretch of raging water.
Kneeling, now, his paddle flashing in and out so rapidly that one could scarce have kept the tally of its stroking, Jean Baptiste shot the frail fabric into the foam-lashed torrent.
The fresh, cool tang of the spray stung his nostrils, and he filled his lungs with the exhilaration of it. A score of times he pitted his strength and the strength of his thin spruce blade against the angry might of the rapids, and a score of times he won.
Now he paddled as if the fiend was following him through this hell of waters. Now his paddle hung poised, every nerve and muscle of Jean Baptiste's body tense, his eyes sharp as hawk's eyes. Then the yellow blade flashed down again, and its cunning thrust won the canoe to safety past a dozen lurking dangers.
Spray splashed in over the bow. The canoe careened, twisted, poised, darted. It shot by hissing ledges, dipped as it went over miniature falls, swung around perilously with disaster threatening on every side, shot like an arrow down a straight stretch, and came at last to the rock-strewn, snag-guarded foot of the rapids.
Here the most dangerous places were passed. The banks of the stream were farther apart, the water ran deeper and more slowly. Jean Baptiste's eyes lit up suddenly, and he nodded to himself, as if in agreement with some inner thought. Yes, this was the place of the testing.
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