"O Harry, what has happened?" he cried; "what has he done now?"
"Old Francis?" asked Harry, pointing at the picture. "He's used the rain this time. Penny squirt, you know. Hurry up, and come to my room. Whisky rather strong, please."
Harry was out of his clinging clothes in a couple of minutes, and, dropping them into an empty hip bath where they could lie innocuous to carpets, got into blankets, and sipping his whisky, told Geoffrey all his story from the moment of the dismemberment of the sluice to his staggering landing half a mile downstream.
"And if ever you want to travel expeditiously by water," he said, in conclusion, "I recommend you a six-foot flood in a narrow channel. But avoid a water-choked bridge ahead of you. Man, it gives you a wambling inside, and no mistake. All the same it makes you feel an A-1 hero afterward, I can tell you that for cert. Why, I'm choking with pride, just choking, though what the particular achievement is I can't tell you. I had to go underneath it, and there were no two words to it. Well, I went."
"But what had happened to Mr. Francis?" asked Geoffrey. "Couldn't he see that the thing was tottery?"
"No, of course not, you dolt; he'd gone trotting off to the farm. Oh, I didn't tell you that part, so you're not a dolt. We went out together, as you saw, and I took a haul on that old stricken sluice, but I couldn't make it budge. So we began walking away, to get men from the farm, but the water was rising so fast that he went on there alone, and I went back to have another pull at it—which I did, with this blessed result; and, O Geoffrey, how dry and warm the rain felt when I had got out of that flood race! Lord! I thought I was done; no, I didn't think it, I only knew I was. But not till I got out did the blessed solution strike me: it was the Luck having another shot. And again it has failed—fire and frost and rain. We've had the whole trio again, and be damned to them! But there's a hitch somewhere; old Francis can't pull it off. Really, I am almost sorry for him!"
Harry's voice was resonant with conviction and triumph; it was as if he had won a battle that was inevitable between him and a subtle foe. The danger he had been through was swallowed up in the victory he had gained. But this lightness of heart found no echo in Geoffrey.
"I don't like it, Harry," he said; "I don't like it one bit. I do not believe in the Luck; it is childish, and you do not believe in the Luck. We have played at make-believe like children, as we played with the discovery of the passage in the yew hedge. And the passage in the yew hedge is far the more real of the two. But it is time to stop all that. Why should these things come to you in such damnable continuity? Why within a few days should you nearly fall into an ice house, then go within an ace of blowing your head off, and finally be carried down in that mill-race of death? There is no use also in saying it is coincidence. Things do not happen like that."
"No, you are right, not by mere coincidence," said Harry; "but they do happen; they have happened to me."