Motionless, and with bated breath, every one stared down on the dead, upturned face, with its wide-open eyes, which seemed full of warning and rebuke. A corner of her skirt had caught on a gnarled stump of a tree, which projected into the river; thus she was anchored, and prevented from drifting down with the stream.
Softly and cautiously, as if playing with it, the current moved the body to and fro, and no one, however much he might wish to avoid it, could help seeing the head as it reposed on the water.
The silence lasted a full ten minutes, and then one of the Schrandeners, who had helped to incarnate the evil conscience of the village, shyly with bent head slunk away, making the bushes crackle and rustle as he went. A second followed; a third, a fourth, ... until at last the scene of the catastrophe was deserted.
The carpenter, who had been contemplating his daughter's dead face, grumbling, and talking to himself the while, found himself alone.
Suddenly he roared out hoarsely, "Fire! fire! fire!" and hurled his gun at the corpse. It went splashing to the bottom of the river, and he staggered after the others as fast as his legs would carry him.
Nothing stirred now near the Cats' Bridge. Boleslav was safe!
* * * * *
Some time elapsed before he was able to take in what he saw. He stared in stupefaction, first at the floating corpse, then at the broken balustrade.
"You should have had it repaired long ago," he thought, and toyed dazedly with the fragments.
Then, as if waking from a dream, he went back to the bank, and climbed down the ravine, where he found broken branches lying about, and freshly-made footmarks. A vague suspicion of what had happened dawned on him, and then quickly died out; the hope that there might yet be time to restore her to life absorbing his mind, to the exclusion of every other emotion.