She struck out bravely; but, already half exhausted from her race through the snowdrifts, she made little headway toward the snag that had capsized the canoe. The water boiled over her, swept her about unmercifully, and blinded her. Terror seized her as she realized that she was not equal to the struggle against it. She went completely under three times, twisted down by the undertow or whirlpools. She was losing! She could not make the snag. And then, coming up for the fourth time, gasping for air, her outflung hand touched something hard and smooth, and her fingers closed over a cylinder of brass. Five minutes later, stunned, almost unable to move a limb from the deadly coldness of the water, she half swam, half floated to a projecting rock far downstream from the point where she had grasped the cylinder. She clutched it with a hand, rested a minute or more, then dragged herself upon it and lay gasping for breath, with the cylinder pressed to her heaving breast. CHAPTER XXVIII THE MESSAGE CHARMIAN was more dead than alive, as the saying goes, when she reached the Cave of Hypocritical Frogs. Here, with shaking hands, she stripped to the skin and rubbed her limbs and body as vigorously as her benumbed condition would permit, her teeth chattering like a tiny riveting machine. The signal fire was smouldering. She raked away the green conifer branches which kept the smoke stream rising and heaped on dry wood. It blazed up soon, and when she dared she stood close to it invoking its warmth. An hour had passed before she felt able to examine the brass cylinder that had come floating so mysteriously down the ice-fringed river. As has been stated, it was about a foot in length by three inches in diameter. One end was solid brass. The other end had been sealed with brown wax. Huddled close to the fire, nude but for the blanket that was wrapped about her, she hacked tremblingly at the wax, first with a hunter’s axe and then a jackknife. The wax surrendered to her prying, and she hacked out perhaps two inches of it. It had been poured in to this depth, she reasoned, to guard against its being loosened by stones and sticks against which it might have bumped in its underground passage from the mountains above the valley. At last it was all loose. She dumped the last of it on the cave floor. Looking in the cylinder, she saw a pasteboard disc the exact size of the container, which had been pressed down against the cargo of this mysterious carrier to stand as a partition against the contents and the melted wax. She pried it out with the point of her knife as one fishes for an obstinate cork. Then, holding her breath, she poured the contents of the cylinder on the floor. Small paper bundles fell out, and among them was a folded piece of paper. This she grasped up first, unfolded, and found to be a note signed Inman Shonto. She read, while the tears brimmed in her eyes: “MY DEAR CHARMIAN: