Bannerman had stripped to the skin, and stood forward looking at the narrowing rush of the river. I could see the great logs of wood, swept from the hill-forests above, dancing along beside us on the curved surface of the stream--so curved by the very force of the current that as our boat, steered by Sambo's skill, kept the centre, the dim banks slid past below us. Across them, just ahead, a curved thread not four feet, now the flood had risen, above the water. The rope bridge! Then I understood.
"Don't!" I cried feebly. "No man--can--withstand the force--of the stream."
He crooked his knees beneath the thwarts and held up his arms.
"Don't----" I cried again.
The boat slackened for an instant; for an instant only. Then it shot on, leaving Bannerman clinging to the rope--shot on round the bend, leaving him hanging there between birth and death. But Sambo never took his watchful eyes off those merry, dancing logs, which meant destruction.
The horror of it all was too much. I fainted. When consciousness returned, Sambo, grave and composed, was bending over me. We were drifting fast into the backwater before my own bungalow, and behind us, looking spectral in the first glint of dawn, lay the great bridge, the flare of the watch-fires on its piers telling of the severity of the flood.
"The Huzoor is at home," said the man quietly; "if Buniah-man sahib had taken my advice he would have been at home also."
We had been a whole day and night on the river; but he seemed no more fatigued than I, who had escaped all the suspense. For the rest, no trace remained of the adventure save an oval scratch on my forehead surrounding the faint vestiges of something like an eye.
"It is the mark of Siva," said my servant piously--he had come down with haste by rail to bring the news of my death--"doubtless he took the Huzoor under his protection; for which I will offer a blood oblation without delay."
Bannerman's body was never found; but some months after, when I was inspecting foundations, I heard the kingfisher's cry, and the familiar cloop of a dive at the further side of the pier. Then Sambo, Rudra, Nilkunta--whatever you please to call him--showed his yellow-brown face above the yellow-brown flood bearing a ring in his mouth: a Palais Royal affair--two diamond hearts transfixed by a ruby arrow.