Page:Athletics and Manly Sport (1890).djvu/382

Rh ; but none of us had ever seen the equal of this man. He swam his horses out in the deep water for a quarter of an hour, riding like a Centaur, every muscle on his lithe body sinking, gathering, contracting, disappearing, in the most astonishing way. He was not a tall or heavy man. When dressed, he was almost common looking. But never a Greek or Roman gladiator, in life or marble, was more beautiful or more powerful than that young Jersey farmer.

When we came to float the canoes, after dinner, I saw, with dismay, that mine was almost half full of water. In a glance, I realized the meaning of the quick tremors that had chilled me in the last rush of the Great Foul Rift. The canoe had been struck twice under the water-line by the keen-edged rocks.

I feared that the end of my trip had come; but we emptied the water and found that the leaks, which were clean-cut, as if by a knife, had swelled, and almost closed. Easton was a dozen or fifteen miles away; and when we got there, Moseley thought he could patch the canoe with resin and linen and make her water-tight.

But it was a heavy paddle, though the stream raced downhill. One of the cuts was bruised afresh, in a rapid about four miles above Easton, and the water spurted into the canoe.