A final spurt, and they cleared the tunnel and reached the pit. The plank lay where they had left it. Across it ran their only road to safety. At a significant signal from Don Spottie led off, and, when he had reached the further side in safety, Puggles followed in his tracks. Doffs threat, coupled with the ominous uproar belched forth by the mouth of the tunnel, eclipsed all fear of the crocodiles.
“Now, Jack,” cried Don, ere the plank had ceased to vibrate under Puggles's tread, “after you.”
Jack crossed, and Don was in the act of stepping on the unstable bridge, when the foremost of the native gang burst from the gallery. One swift backward glance—a glance that stowed him how alarmingly narrow was the margin between escape and capture—and with outstretched arms he balanced himself on the handbreadth of plank—it was scarcely more—and began the perilous passage. Swift as was this backward glance, it sufficed to show him, too, that the leader of the pursuit was none other than the escaped lascar; and ere he had traversed half the plank's length, he felt it yield and rebound beneath the quick tread of the fellows feet. At the same instant Jack raised a warning shout.
There are moments when the strongest nerve quails, the steadiest head swings a little off its balance, the surest foot slips. Such a moment did this prove for Don. The disconcerting vibration of the plank, the knowledge that the lascar was at his very back, Jack's sudden shout—these for an instant conspired against and overcame his natural cool-headedness. He made a hurried step or two, staggered, and, his foot catching in the rope where it encircled the plank a short distance from the end, he stumbled and fell.
Fell! but in falling dislodged the end of the plank which lay behind him, and on which the lascar stood, from its hold upon the further brink of the pit. The lascar, throwing up his arms with a despairing shriek, plunged headlong into the pool, where he was instantly seized upon by the ravenous crocodiles and torn limb from limb.
And now, if ever, did the “Providence that sits up aloft” watch over Don. Almost miraculously, as it seemed, instead of plunging into the horrible death-trap below, he fell astride the plank, the hither end of which still retained its hold upon the rock at an angle of perhaps sixty-five degrees; and up this steep incline—whither Bosin had already preceded him—with Jack's assistance he managed to scramble. Then they laid hold upon the plank and dragged it from the pit, amid the furious howling of the baffled rabble debouching from the tunnel opposite.
“Safe over, at any rate,” panted Don. “But—good heavens! what's become of the lascar?” For, suspended as he had been between life and death, he had neither heard the lascar's shriek nor witnessed the horrible manner in which he had received his quietus at the jaws of the crocodiles.