It was a question of steering; steering without eyes, steering by instinct, steering by sheer experience of logs and their ways, of the meeting currents of the two rivers and their ways.
And over against them, to the right across the broad lagoon, were low brick buildings, and a horde of fifteen hundred ruffians with fascines and earth-baskets finishing a dam that was to alter the currents, and protect the canal! They looked like swarming ants in the sunshine.
The wales were neck and neck now, side by side, straight as a die on the log. Then suddenly, the right-hand one swerved outward. Only a yard or two; a yard or two nearer to the ants in the sunshine.
A second after the log swerved also--swerved to the right. The next, two black heads rose silently; but one of them was two yards to the left of that dancing, dipping prize!
Gu-gu, breathless as he was, gave an inarticulate cry of rage, and shook his fist at the swarming ants. Already their work was altering the currents he had known for so long. That it was possible to allow for this, as Am-ma had done, did not comfort him. He swam back sulkily, his wrath increased by the knowledge one glance had given him, that the log on which his rival was paddling to shore triumphantly bore its broad arrow so lightly, and so near its end, that a little dexterous manipulation would have left the runaway unmarked, and so given its captor the right, not merely of ransom, but of sale!
Truly, it was an ill world for the poor!
But Lance Carlyon laughed, as he lounged over his early tea and watched the river through his field-glass, in a balcony of the fort, dressed in a gorgeous ring-streaked sleeping suit which he could only wear when on outpost duty, as the regiment had tabooed it. In truth it made him not unlike Tom Sawyer's "Royal Nonsuch."
"The little 'un's got it! I say! Dering, I believe I shall like Eshwara. It's--it's--new--don't you know." His eyes rested, as he spoke, on the low, bastioned building, all hemmed in by temple spires, at the very point of the city's triangle, which Erda Shepherd had told him was the mission house. Truly, he thought, she was in the thick of it!
"New!" echoed Vincent Dering captiously, "I should have called it old. I thought that sort of thing had died with the pagoda tree."
"What sort of thing?"