Jean Baptiste dug his paddle cunningly into the foaming water and darted the bow of his light craft between two big black rocks, against which the water leaped in boiling fury. Instantly the stern of the canoe was caught by the current and swung around sharply, so that the boat lay directly across the course of the stream. It brought up sharply against a snag, there was a slivery crash, Les Walters uttered a yell of terror, and the canoe rolled over, hurling the three of them into the icy, swirling current.
For a moment Jean Baptiste shot downstream under the water, like a diving otter, the bursting bubbles crackling in his ears. Then, with a shout, he came to the surface and flung the water from his hair and eyes.
He turned quickly and looked back. Into his dark eyes came a sudden look of pain—the hurt look of a dog punished for he knows not what.
Charlotte—she had not turned to Jean Baptiste, to her husband, in her extremity. No, she had looked to the sawyer. A woman's dependence upon a man, Jean Baptiste had figured out in his simple soul, is the sum of her love for him. In the bush country, a woman selects the man who can best protect her, who can provide most safely for her and for the children she expects to bear; and Charlotte had turned for protection, not to her husband, but to Les.
While Jean Baptiste watched, Charlotte reached up out of the swirling waters and seized the frantically struggling sawyer by his shoulders, calling out in a voice inarticulate with fear. Like a flash Les turned, struck her full in the face, and threw her from him. Then, scrambling madly, he made for the safety of the shore.
Charlotte cried aloud with the pain of the blow, and her mane of black hair, loosened and streaming in the water, mingled again with the current. Struggling, her dress impeding her movements, she came, floundering helplessly, toward her husband.
She saw him standing there, waist deep in the surging flood, leaning against its might, and she screamed to him in a voice shrill with terror; but Jean Baptiste's face hardened, and he watched her with eyes as cold as the wet, slippery rocks over which poured the merciless black waters.
Swiftly the churning water bore her toward the sucking whirlpools at the foot of the rapids. Just as she swept by the motionless figure of Jean Baptiste, her face emerged from the flood, and on her white cheek her husband saw a blood-washed scar—a tiny, curving cut made by the heavy seal ring the sawyer wore.
Just in time Jean Baptiste reached out. His strong fingers sank firmly through wet cloth and gripped like steel the wet and slippery flesh beneath. With one powerful motion of his body he swept his wife from the water, and against his breast. She lay there, gasping and whimpering like the puppies Jean Baptiste raised to be sledge dogs, while her husband, cautiously feeling his way on the treacherous bottom, struggled toward the shore.
From time to time he glanced down at the white, dripping face so close to his own, and his eyes glinted with a fierce satisfaction.
From the little cut on her face fresh blood welled up to make a crimson stain on the wet, pale face. Always there would be a scar there. Always, when she looked in a mirror, that reminder would be before her eyes. Jean Baptiste, who had a certain understanding of women as a heritage from his gay voyageur forbears, was content that it should be so.
There had been a testing—a greater testing than he had planned. It had been a testing of two souls, instead of but one; but that also was well.
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