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Updated: May 3, 2025
So he brought out his pack and Marette's smaller bundle, and laid his rifle and pistol holster across them. It was three o'clock when the character of the river began to change, and Kent smiled happily. They were entering upon swifter waters. There were places where the channel narrowed, and they sped through rapids.
And as his lips tightened, crushing fiercely the exclamation of his horror, there came a trembling happiness from Marette's lips, scarcely more than the whisper of a song, the low, thrilling melody of Le Chaudiere. Her arms reached up, and she drew his head down to her, so that for a time his visions were blinded in that sweet smother of her hair.
As he reached for the two forks, his lips pressed against her hair. The pink deepened in Marette's face, and the soft little note that was like laughter came into her throat. Her hand caressed his cheek as she rose to her feet, and Kent laughed back.
His swimming prowess was of little avail now. He was like a chip. All his effort was to make of himself a barrier between Marette's soft body and the rocks. It was not the water itself that he feared, but the rocks. There were scores and hundreds of them, like the teeth of a mighty grinding machine. And the jaw was a quarter of a mile in length. He felt the first shock, the second, the third.
Kent, holding his breath, saw the almost imperceptible tensing of Marette's body and the wavering of Pelly's arms over his head. Another moment and he, too, would have called the bluff if it were that. But that moment did not come.
It was the horrible, overwhelming certainty of the thing. The years fell from him, and he sobbed sobbed like a boy stricken by some great childish grief, as he searched along the edge of the shore. Over and over again he cried and whispered Marette's name. But he did not shout it again, for he knew that she was dead. She was gone from him forever. Yet he did not cease to search.
Cautiously he opened it three or four inches and sat down with his back against the wall, listening. He heard Kedsty pass through into the big room where Marette had waited for him a short time before. After that there was silence except for the tumult of the storm. For an hour Kent listened. In all that time he did not hear a sound from the lower hall or from Marette's room.
He did not hear himself, but the thought itself was a tumultuous thing within him. It came upon him like an inundation, a sudden and thrilling inspiration backed by the forces of a visual truth. THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN. He repeated the words, staring at the three colossal heads in the sky. Somewhere near them, under them, one side or the other was Marette's hidden valley! He went on.
For he believed, now that the thought came to him like a dagger stroke, that this was so. Her act in freeing him had brought about the final climax, and as a result of it, Kedsty was dead. He went to the foot of the stair. Quietly, in his shoeless feet, he began to climb them. He wanted to cry out Marette's name even before he came to the top.
There was blood on his clothing. The evidence was convincing, deadly. And this man " Kent paused, and in the darkness Marette's hand crept down his arm to his hand, and her fingers closed round it. "Was the man you lied to save," she whispered. "Yes. When the halfbreed's bullet got me, I thought it was a good chance to repay Sandy McTrigger for what he did for me in that tent years before.
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