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We had been on our way for hours without seeing a steamer or vessel of any kind, our little craft having the wide water-way all to itself. Whilst the Saone is the most navigable river in the world, quite opposite is the character of its brother Rhone.

Komba went to the bows and his people, taking the broad paddles, rowed and pushed the boat along the water-way made by the hippopotami through the tall and matted reeds, from which ducks and other fowl rose in multitudes with a sound like thunder. A quarter of an hour or so of paddling through these weed-encumbered shallows brought us to the deep and open lake.

Here is the reekingly rich soil of the great Delta that name not meaning the wide marshes of the actual mouth of the Mississippi, but the fat accumulated soil of centuries caged in by that long, incurving dam of the hills which, far inland from the current of the swift water-way, begins at the head of the vast body of tangled Yazoo lands, and drops down, pinching in at the base of a great "V," where the bluffs converge near Vicksburg.

And, indeed, this was the true aspect of things, as Courtenay discovered when he had successfully brought the ship past three ugly reefs and dropped anchor in the backwater of a small sheltered bay. He speedily abandoned the half-formed hope that the Kansas might have run into an ocean water-way which communicated with Smyth Channel.

I was startled, as if of necessity the principal beacon in the water-way of the greatest town on earth should have presented imposing proportions. And, behold! the brown sprit-sail of a barge hid it entirely from my view.

Clarke sent a messenger to Hughes's Hotel asking Dion to meet her at the landing-place on the right of the Galata Bridge at a quarter to eleven. "We will go to Eyub by caique," she wrote, "and lunch at a Turkish café I know close to the mosque." She drove to the bridge. When she came in sight of it she saw Dion standing on it alone, looking down on the crowded water-way.

"Yes," I answered, "almost though it's so choked up it's almost impossible to say." "Well," said the "King," "that's the idea; you haven't forgotten those old ruins we are going to explore. You remember how choked up they are. Well, this was the covered water-way, the secret creek, by which the pirates John Teach, or whoever it was, perhaps John P. Tobias himself used to land their loot.

There may, too, be people who would say that spheres of influence is not a term that can properly be applied to a great water-way such as the Pacific. I am not, however, on the present occasion arguing with pedants.

In the beginning of this story I said what Lac Tremblant was like. It was a lake that was no lake; that should have been our water-way out of the bush instead of miles of expensive road; and was no more practicable than a rope ladder to the stars. For the depth of Lac Tremblant, or its fairway, were two things no man might count on.

On he sped, cleaving the crowd like a flood-tide in Gloucester bay, diving under the first arch that caught his eye, dashing down a lane to an unlit water-way, and plunging across a narrow hump-back bridge which landed him in a black pocket between walls. But now his pursuers were at his back, reinforced by the yelping mob.