Ingleby, who was nearest her, stood up. The light was growing dim in the cañon, and it was a moment before he could make out what she pointed to. Hetty, however, was staring at it with a curious intensity, and there was, he noticed, apprehension in her eyes. The object drove on quietly, an insignificant dusky blur, swinging and swaying with the pulsations of the river, and Ingleby felt the girl's hand close suddenly on his arm.
"Oh," she said, with a little gasp, "it's coming straight here. I'm afraid of it, Walter."
The thing swung in towards them with the whirl of the eddy, and Ingleby had for a moment a glimpse of a white patch in the water that was horribly suggestive of a face. Then he seized Hetty's hand, and drew her with him as he turned away.
"Stay there!" he said, when a great pine rose between them and the river, and went scrambling back to the water's edge.
Two or three other men, among whom was Tomlinson, had reached it by this time, and Sewell stood on a boulder gazing at the stream, while the dusky object, drawn almost under now, swung by amidst a rush of foam. Then he stepped down, and looked steadily at the men about him.
"I fancy Trooper Probyn has come back," he said.
Ingleby was close beside him, and for a moment the two men looked into each other's eyes. In less than another minute the object they had seen would swing out with the outflow at the tail of the pool, and the long white rapid would whirl it beyond their reach into the gloom again. Night was close at hand, and, if they let him pass, Trooper Probyn would by morning have travelled far into the heart of a wilderness where it was scarcely likely that any of them would ever overtake him. The rivers of the North run fast, and that is a country wherein the strongest man must travel slowly. It seemed to Ingleby that it might be better to let him go. Then he was ashamed of the doubt that this implied, and Sewell, who knew what he was thinking, glanced for just a second in Tomlinson's direction.
"One can't hide the truth. It will come out," he said, and then raised his voice. "That's a man we have something to do for. The rapid will have him in a minute, boys."
Tomlinson was first into the water, with Ingleby almost at his side, and the rest floundering and splashing close behind. They went straight, while the thing that swung with the eddy went round, but they were in the lip of the rapid before they came up with it. Ingleby gasped as he braced himself against the flood which broke in a white swirl to his waist, while the stream-borne gravel smote his legs, and he clutched at the big miner as Trooper Probyn drove down on them.
He evaded Tomlinson, but Ingleby, stooping, seized his uniform, and tightened his hold on his companion as his feet were dragged from under him. He could almost have fancied that Trooper Probyn struggled to be free from them, and while the current frothed about him Tomlinson was dragged backwards by the strain. Ingleby went under, still clinging fiercely to the sodden tunic, and for a second or two it seemed that all of them, the dead and the living, must go down the rapid together, in which case no man could have distinguished between them when they were washed out at the tail of it. Then a man clinging to his comrade with one hand seized Tomlinson; there was a straining of hardened muscles, a wild splashing and floundering, and, while one who leaned across a boulder gasped and wondered if his arm was leaving its socket, the line swung into slack water again. Still, Ingleby had driven against a stone with a thud that drove out most of the little breath left in him.