“I shall make use of that,” he answered, pointing to a coil of rope that hung on his saddle-bow.
“What I mean to do is——”
The sound of breaking planks signalled a danger with which he had not reckoned. He saw one of the end pontoons wrench itself free. Hera saw it too, as it bore away to drift alone; and they knew it for a warning grimly clear that all the members of their uncertain bark must part company ere long.
In the silence that fell between them she looked toward the Viadetta bank, where peasants awoke the echoes with their hue and cry. He kept his gaze on the spear of land that marked the river’s sharpest turn. Once or twice he measured with his eye the lessening distance between them and the shore.
“We hold to the right course,” he said, confidently. “There will be time.”
Piece by piece Hera saw the thing that bore them scatter its parts over the river.
“What shall we do?” she asked, a shudder of fear mingling strangely with trust in him.
At first he made her no answer, but continued to watch the shore as if striving to discern some signal. Another pontoon broke loose, carrying off a part of the deck and leaving the rest of the planks it had supported hanging in the water. The sound of the breaking timbers did not make him turn his head. When at last he faced her it was to speak in tones all at odds with their desperate state.
“See the Old Sentinel!” he exclaimed, gleefully. “He shall save us!”
Not far to the south she could see the projecting land, a flat place and bare except for some carved stones lying there in a semblance of order—the bleached ruins, in fact, of a temple raised by one of her ancestors. The wash of ages had brought the river much nearer than it was in the days of that rude conqueror, and one stone, bedded deep in the mould, stood erect at the water’s edge. Its base was hidden, but enough remained above ground to tell what part it had played in architecture—a section of a rounded column. Brianza folk knew it by the name of the Old Sentinel. Always it had been there, they told the stranger. Now the magic of the low sun changed it into a shaft of gold. From childhood Hera had known the ancient landmark, and was the more puzzled to divine how it could serve them now.