He kissed her, and they both spat the mud from their lips, laughing. Courbertin floundered round a corner of the wreckage. "Never was there such a man!" he cried, gleefully. "He is mad, crazy! There is no appeasement. His skull is cracked by the fall, and his tobacco is gone. It is chiefly the tobacco which is lamentable." But his skull was not cracked, for it was merely a slit of the scalp of five inches or so. "You'll have to wait till the others come back. I can't carry." Jacob Welse pointed to his right arm, which hung dead. "Only wrenched," he explained. "No bones broken." The baron struck an extravagant attitude and pointed down at Frona's foot. "Ah! the water, it is gone, and there, a jewel of the flood, a pearl of price!" Her well-worn moccasins had gone rotten from the soaking, and a little white toe peeped out at the world of slime. "Then I am indeed wealthy, baron; for I have nine others." "And who shall deny? who shall deny?" he cried, fervently. "What a ridiculous, foolish, lovable fellow it is!" "I kiss your hand." And he knelt gallantly in the muck. She jerked her hand away, and, burying it with its mate in his curly mop, shook his head back and forth. "What shall I do with him, father?" Jacob Welse shrugged his shoulders and laughed; and she turned Courbertin's face up and kissed him on the lips. And Jacob Welse knew that his was the larger share in that manifest joy. The river, fallen to its winter level, was pounding its ice-glut steadily along. But in falling it had rimmed the shore with a twenty-foot wall of stranded floes. The great blocks were spilled inland among the thrown and standing trees and the slime-coated flowers and grasses like the titanic vomit of some Northland monster. The sun was not idle, and the steaming thaw washed the mud and foulness from the bergs till they blazed like heaped diamonds in the brightness, or shimmered opalescent-blue. Yet they were reared hazardously one on another, and ever and anon flashing towers and rainbow minarets crumbled thunderously into the flood. By one of the gaps so made lay La Bijou, and about it, saving _chechaquos_ and sick men, were grouped the denizens of Split-up. "Na, na, lad; twa men'll be a plenty." Tommy McPherson sought about him with his eyes for corroboration. "Gin ye gat three i' the canoe 'twill be ower comfortable." "It must be a dash or nothing," Corliss spoke up. "We need three men, Tommy, and you know it." "Na, na; twa's a plenty, I'm tellin' ye." "But I'm afraid we'll have to do with two." The Scotch-Canadian evinced his satisfaction openly. "Mair'd be a bother; an' I doot not ye'll mak' it all richt, lad." "And you'll make one of those two, Tommy," Corliss went on, inexorably. "Na; there's ithers a plenty wi'oot coontin' me." "No, there's not. Courbertin doesn't know the first thing. St. Vincent evidently cannot cross the slough. Mr. Welse's arm puts him out of it. So it's only you and I, Tommy."