She tried now to spring up, and to run; and she tried to cry out. But Crazy Snake, with a single bound, caught her by the hair, and threw her to the ground. He flashed forth a knife, now, and thrust it before her terrified eyes. “Injun kill!” he gurgled, in a way to make her blood run cold. “White girl want Blackfoot kill?” “Yes, kill me!” she said, in sudden desperation. “Nothing better could happen to me now.” However, he did not put his threat into execution, for he had simply been trying to frighten her. He lifted her in his bare, painted arms, and deposited her in the canoe, she being too helpless from fear and weakness to do anything to prevent this. Then he stepped into the canoe himself, pushed it off from shore, and, seating himself deliberately, he took up the paddle and sent the light boat skimming downstream. The current began to race faster here, and this, with the strokes of the paddle, hurled the canoe on at dizzying speed. Yet this speed was as nothing compared with that which the canoe made later on, when it was caught in the torrent that rushed in wild cataracts through the pinched-in space of the narrowed cañon, where the black walls came close together, and towered to a great height overhead. Crazy Snake was skillful with the paddle. The girl’s eyes were fixed on the water ahead, and though more than once it seemed to her that the frail craft must surely be split on some rock, with a deft turn he guided it past the danger point, and on down the wild and tumbling stream. Lena Forest tried to think with something of sanity of her condition, and failed utterly. Horror still held her, and she came from under its spell but slowly. When the rapids had been passed safely, Crazy Snake began to talk. “Brown Eyes know why the great Blackfoot chief, Crazy Snake, do this?” he said, naming her thus from the color of her eyes. She stared at him, as if she did not comprehend his meaning, but really because she was still too terrified to answer him. “Blackfeet kill man that dig for the yellow earth,” he explained. “The yellow earth makes the white man crazy, and he steals the land of the Indians that he may dig it. So we kill him.” She knew that he meant her father. “White men hunting for the yellow earth threw a bad spell on the Blackfeet. The evil spirits were made mad, and killed the Blackfeet. They died. The son of Crazy Snake died. For that we kill the white men.” She was sitting in the bow of the canoe, facing him, and he stared at her with his shining black eyes, that looked so like the eyes of a snake. She did not wonder that he was called, or called himself, Crazy Snake; for those snaky eyes, to her heated imagination, seemed like the eyes of some deadly serpent. They almost fascinated her. “But--but why do you--take me?” she gasped at last. Crazy Snake gave utterance to what seemed almost a chuckle.