It was James Lawrence, the English rancher, and Miss Carrington who told me what happened to those we left behind after the fateful moment when the canoe first slipped clear of the shingle bank. Lawrence accompanied the party on their return journey, and it was he who suggested sending Grace and Miss Carrington across in the canoe. The river ran high that morning, and he felt dubious about the ford, because several pack-horses had already been drowned there.
The first intimation he had of anything wrong was a cry from the girl, and he saw a strip of water widen between the canoe and the bank. He ran his hardest, but made little headway, for thorny bushes and fern formed thickets along the bank, while when he reached the boulders he felt that he had come too late, because no swimmer could then overtake the canoe, even if he escaped destruction in the first rapid immediately below. Nevertheless, after a glance at the drawn face of the girl, which haunted him long afterward, as with the first shock of terror on her she labored helplessly at the paddle, he would even have made the hopeless attempt but that Colonel Carrington, who of all the trio had retained his common sense, intervened. It was not without reason that the Colonel had earned the reputation of being a hard man.
“Come back! Stop him! Geoffrey, are you mad?” he roared; and Lawrence, who had now recovered his wits, flung himself upon a man who, stripping himself to the 185 waist as he ran, floundered at breakneck speed among the boulders. They went down together heavily, and the next moment the runner had him by the throat, hissing through his teeth, “Let go, you fool, before I murder you!”
Lawrence was strong, however, and held fast half-choked for a moment or two, until the Colonel’s cry reached them again:
“Get up, Geoffrey, you lunatic! Follow, and head them off along the bank!”
The shouts and the confusion had startled his restive horse, and by the time he had mounted the pair were on their feet again stumbling over the boulders or smashing through the undergrowth in a desperate race, with the horse blundering behind them and the canoe ahead. They might possibly have overtaken it except for the rapid, Lawrence said, but it swept like a toboggan down that seething rush, and, as realizing that it was almost hopeless, they held on, there was a clatter on the opposite slope, and they saw me break out at headlong gallop from the woods. They halted when I crawled into the canoe, for we were beyond all human help from that bank now; and, flinging himself from the saddle, Colonel Carrington stood with clenched hands and quivering lips, staring after us, so Lawrence said, out of awful eyes.
“Bravo!” he gasped at length. “He’ll reach the gravel-spit. Another two good strokes—they’re almost in the eddy;” but the next words were frozen on his lips, for the backwash from a boulder swept away the bows of the canoe, and the words that followed came hoarse and brokenly, “My God—he’s too late!”
Colonel Carrington was right, for, as held still and spellbound they watched, the canoe leaped down the entrance rapid and was lost in the mist of the black cañon. The Colonel said nothing further, though he groaned aloud, and 186 Lawrence did not care to look at him; but Ormond’s face was ashy until a livid fury filled it as he turned upon the rancher.
“Confusion to you! Why must you stop me then?” he demanded.
“You would only have drowned yourself in the rapid and done nobody any good,” Lawrence said.