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The World for Sale, Volume 1. by Gilbert Parker
page 17 of 104 (16%)
Osterhaut and Jowett, those wild spectators of her adventure: but they
were not wholly real. Only those soft, booming bells in her brain were
real.

Shooting the Rapids of Carillon was the bridge by which she passed from
the world she had left to this other. Her girlhood was ended--wondering,
hovering, unrealizing girlhood. This adventure was the outward sign, the
rite in the Lodge of Life which passed her from one degree of being to
another.

She was safe; but now as her canoe shot onward to the town of Carillon,
her senses again grew faint. Again she felt the buffeting mist, again
her face was muffled in smothering folds; again great hands reached out
towards her; again her eyes were drawn into a stupefying darkness; but
now there was no will to fight, no energy to resist. The paddle lay
inert in her fingers, her head drooped. She slowly raised her head once,
twice, as though the call of the exhausted will was heard, but suddenly
it fell heavily upon her breast. For a moment so, and then as the canoe
shot forward on a fresh current, the lithe body sank backwards in the
canoe, and lay face upward to the evening sky.

The canoe sped on, but presently it swung round and lay athwart the
current, dipping and rolling.

From the banks on either side, the Indians of the Manitou Reservation and
the two men from Lebanon called out and hastened on, for they saw that
the girl had collapsed, and they knew only too well that her danger was
not yet past. The canoe might strike against the piers of the bridge at
Carillon and overturn, or it might be carried to the second cataract
below the town. They were too far away to save her, but they kept
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