They stared horror-stricken, with tense, blanched faces. Each instant seemed as if it must be his last, for they knew that no man alive could hope to keep his feet in the mad rush and sweep of the tumbling, tossing drive.
Yet the greener was keeping his feet. Time and again he recovered his balance when death seemed imminent, and amid wild shouts and yells of encouragement, climbing, leaping, running, stumbling, he worked his way shoreward.
He was almost opposite the bateau now, and Stromberg, hastily coiling the light line, leaped into the bow. Then, just when it seemed possible the greener might make it, a huge log shot upward from the depths and fell with a crash squarely across the log upon which he was riding.
A cry of horror went up from half a hundred throats as the man was thrown high in the air and fell back into the foaming white-water that showed here and here through the thinning tangle of logs.
The next instant a hundred logs passed over the spot, drawn down by the suck of the rapid.
CHAPTER XXV
"THE-MAN-WHO-CANNOT-DIE"
During the infinitesimal interim between the shock which hurled him into the air, and the closing of the waters of Blood River over his head, Bill Carmody's brain received a confusion of flashlike impressions: The futile shouting and waving of arms upon the man-crowded bank of the river; the sudden roar of the rapid; the tense face of Fallon; the set jaw of big Stromberg as he stood ready to shoot out the line; and, above all, the leering eyes and sneering lips of Moncrossen.
The accident happened a scant sixty feet from the side of the straining bateau, and the features of its occupants were brought out strongly in the clear morning light.