"It's a guid deed we'll 'a doon this day," he remarked, pleasantly.
"To gie a hand in distress is guid i' the sight of God."
"Who's afeared ?" Frona laughed.
"Weel," he deliberated, "I was a bit fashed, no doot, but--"
His utterance ceased, and he seemed suddenly to petrify. His eyes
fixed themselves in a terrible stare over Frona's shoulder. And then,
slowly and dreamily, with the solemnity fitting an invocation of Deity,
murmured, "Guid Gawd Almichty!"
They whirled their heads about. A wall of ice was sweeping round the
bend, and even as they looked the right-hand flank, unable to compass
the curve, struck the further shore and flung up a ridge of heaving
mountains.
"Guid Gawd! Guid Gawd! Like rats i' the trap!" Tommy jabbed his
paddle futilely in the water.
"Get the stroke!" Corliss hissed in his ear, and La Bijou sprang away.
Frona steered straight across the current, at almost right angles, for
Split-up; but when the sandspit, over which they had portaged, crashed
at the impact of a million tons, Corliss glanced at her anxiously. She
smiled and shook her head, at the same time slacking off the course.
"We can't make it," she whispered, looking back at the ice a couple of
hundred feet away. "Our only chance is to run before it and work in
slowly."
She cherished every inward inch jealously, holding the canoe up as
sharply as she dared and at the same time maintaining a constant
distance ahead of the ice-rim.
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