He instinctively struck out, but the tearing water, mocking his feeble efforts, buffeted him this way and that as with the swing of giant arms. Sometimes he was spun helplessly on the end of his line like a trolling-spoon. He was flung sideways around a boulder and pressed there by the hands of the current until it seemed the breath was slowly leaving his body. Dazed, blinded, gasping, he somehow managed to struggle over it, and was cast further in-shore. The tendency of the current was to sweep him in now. If he could only keep alive! The stones were thicker in-shore. He was beaten first on one side, then the other. All his conscious efforts were reduced to protecting his head from the rocks with his arms.
The water may have been but a foot or two deep, but of course he could gain no footing. He still dragged his leaden burden. All the breath was knocked out of him under the continual blows, but he was conscious of no pain. The last few moments were a blank. He found himself in the back-water, and expended his last ounce of strength in crawling out on hands and knees on the beach. He cast himself flat, sobbing for breath.
Mary came running to his aid. He was able to nod to her reassuringly, and in the ecstasy of her relief, she sat down suddenly, and wept like a white woman. Stonor gathered himself together and sat up groaning. The onset of pain was well-nigh unendurable. He felt literally as if his flesh all over had been pounded to a jelly. But all his limbs, fortunately, responded to their functions.
“Lie still,” Mary begged of him.
He shook his head. “I must keep moving, or I’ll become as helpless as a log.”
The nameless thing was floating in the back-water. Together they dragged it out on the stones. It was Stonor’s first sight of that which had cost him such pains to secure. He nerved himself to bear it. Mary was no fine lady, but she turned her head away. The man’s face was totally unrecognizable by reason of the battering it had received on the rocks; his clothes were partly in ribbons; there was a gaping wound in the breast.
For the rest, as far as Stonor could judge, it was the body of a young man, and a comely one. His skin was dark like that of an Italian, or a white man with a quarter or eighth strain of Indian blood in his veins. Stonor was astonished by this fact; nothing that he had heard had suggested that Imbrie was not as white as himself. This put a new look on affairs. For an instant Stonor doubted. But the man’s hand was well-formed and well-kept; and in what remained of his clothes one could still see the good materials and the neatness. In fact, it could be none other than Imbrie.
He was roused from his contemplation of the gruesome object by a sharp exclamation from Mary. Looking up, he saw Clare a quarter of a mile away, hastening to them along the beach. His heart sank.
“Go to her,” he said quickly. “Keep her from coming here.”
Mary hastened away. Stonor followed more slowly, disguising his soreness as best he could. For him it was cruel going over the stones—yet all the way he was oddly conscious of the beauty of the wild cascade, sweeping down between its green shores.