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                            Trial by Water

                       By SEWELL PEASLEE WRIGHT

              _A son of the voyageurs tests the hearts of
              his young wife and of his debonair friend._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                Argosy All-Story Weekly March 30 1929.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


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 broad, 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 novelty, 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.


                                  II.

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.

[Illustration: _He glanced down--and his eyes glittered with a sort of
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.


                               THE END.



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