“There’s a very good box. Swing you across in no time,” replied the driver, with a grin, and a wink at the colonial man.
“Mercy on us!” exclaimed the lady passenger, showing a very white face beneath the hood of her mackintosh. “I’ll never be able to do it. Those horrible boxes! I know them.”
“You’ve got to do it, Missis, or stay this side!” returned the driver, with a fiendish grin.
And now as the cart crests another rise, a dull rumbling sound is audible through splash of hoof and wheel, which, as they draw nearer, breaks into a booming roar. It is the voice of the swollen river. The clouds hang low above the scrub, lying, an opaque veil, against the slopes of the opposite heights; and ever, without a break, the rain falls steadily down. The colonial man has managed to light a pipe, and, with characteristic philosophy, smokes steadily and uncomplainingly; an example Roden Musgrave would fain follow, but that he finds his fair companion in adversity literally such a handful, that he cannot even get at his pipe, let alone fill and light it: the fact being that he is obliged to devote all his energies to holding the latter on her perch, for so exhausted is the poor thing with fatigue and discomfort that, were it not for his support, her insecure place would promptly know her no more.
Another rise is topped, and now the river-bed lies before and beneath them; and in truth the spectacle is enough to make the heart of the timid or inexperienced traveller feel somewhat small. The stream is indeed rolling yards high—a red, turbid flood coursing along some fifty feet below, in the bottom of its bed—rearing its mighty masses up in great hissing, crashing waves, rolling over tree-trunks and all kinds of driftwood, with here and there a drowned bullock, whose branching horns and ghastly staring eyes leap weirdly into view, immediately to be drawn in and sucked under by the flood. And this wild, roaring, seething horror—this crashing resistless current whose thunderous voice alone is deafening, appalling—has to be crossed somehow.
“Nay, what! Can’t even swim the horses through that!” says the driver, Henry, as he descends from his seat, while a couple of Hottentot boys, who have emerged from a squalid shanty by the roadside, are busy outspanning. “We shall have to send over passengers and mails in the box.”
“Oh heavens!” faintly ejaculates the distressed fair one; “I can never do it!”
“Oh yes you can!” says Roden, who has assisted her to alight. “It’s perfectly safe if you sit still and keep your head. Don’t be in the least afraid; I’ll see you across all right.”
She gives him a grateful glance, and answers that she will try. Seen as she stands up she is a good-looking woman of about thirty, with light brown hair and blue eyes. She is rather above the middle height, and there is a piteous look in her white and travel-worn face, half expressive of a consciousness of looking her worst, half of the mingled apprehension and discomfort born of the situation.
“Go on up to the box, lady and gentlemen,” says Henry, the post driver. “I’ll bring along your traps, and send ’em over with the mail-bags.”