“Paul,” I cried desperately, urgently, commandingly, “pull out your arm. I have come to save you.”
His eyes opened. He stared at me. Then life seemed to come back to his face. He made a frantic, choking, gasping struggle; once he went altogether down; then, with a sucking sound his arm came up, the fingers closed on my board. I caught his poor, cold, slimy hand. I pulled with all my strength. His grip was like a convulsion. Inch by inch I dragged him towards the bank. The stream surrendered its victim with a sort of sticky sob, and he lay there on the ground beside me, lifeless as a log, hardly to be recognized as a human being, so daubed and drenched was he with the black ooze that had so nearly been his death. My attempts to restore him were soon successful, for it was exhaustion, not suffocation, that had made him faint. He had taken very little of the mud into his mouth, but, struggling there in the bottomless, horrible slough for nearly half an hour had taxed his strength to the last gasp.
He opened his eyes and looked up at me with an expression of grave astonishment. I knew that he had not expected me to be such a serious criminal as to make this deliberate attempt on his life, and, yet, I was sure as his large, gray eyes searched me that he was deliberating the possibility. He sat up presently, and, taking my handkerchief, he wiped off his face and hair and hands.
“The rest is hopeless,” he said.
“The other man?” I asked him shudderingly, my eyes fixed on the smooth and oily water.
He looked at me with a puzzled face. “The other man! There was not any other man...” Then, stilt looking at me, a faint, unwilling flush stole up his cheek.
“Miss Gale,” he said, “you are without doubt my guardian angel. And yet, strangely enough, I had a dreadful vision of what you might be as another kind of angel. When I was going down,”—he shivered all over and glanced at the stream, whose surface was now as smooth as it would have been had he sunk beneath it,—“when I was going down, and at the last of my strength,—I was delirious, I suppose,—but I had a sort of vision. I thought you stood there on the bank above me, and looked down with your narrow face between its two wings of red hair, and mocked me. Just as I was settling down to death, you disappeared. And, just a few moments later, there you were again, this time with the aura of a saint... Miss Gale,”—and here he looked at me with entire seriousness, dropping his tone of mockery,—“do you believe in dual personalities?”
“Really, Mr. Dabney,” I said, “I don't think it's a very good time to take up the subject.”
He looked away from me, and spoke low with an air of confusion. “You called me 'Paul' when you shoved out that blessed board, which has gone down in my place...”
I paid no attention to this remark, but stood up. Silently he, too, rose and we laid a log across the deadly opening of the bridge and balanced carefully back to safety. I could not think of my leap of a few minutes before without a feeling of deathly sickness.