“Any hope of its being over soon, Jack?” demanded Josh, as soon as he could make himself heard.
“Nothing doing that I could see,” came the loud reply, for what with the howl of the wind and the dash of the agitated waters against the boat it was no easy matter to make oneself heard. “All black around. You can’t see twenty feet away for the rain and the gloom.”
“Jack, do you happen to know whether there’s any rapids or falls along the Danube?” asked George presently.
“I’m not so sure about it,” replied the other; “seems to me I did hear some talk about rapids or falls or something, though it may have been about the river away up above Vienna.”
Buster at that found himself possessed with a new cause for alarm. He pictured Niagara Falls, and the powerboat plunging over the beetling brink, with four boys he knew full well fastened in its interior, helpless victims. Then as the mood changed he could see Whirlpool Rapids below the falls, through which no ordinary boat had been known to pass safely, but always emerged in splinters, after buffeting the half-hidden sharp-pointed rocks, and urged on by the frightful current.
“Listen! I thought I heard a distant roaring sound just then that might be the falls, fellows!” Buster broke out with.
Although the others all suspected that it was only the result of a lively imagination that caused him to say this, at the same time they could not help straining their hearing to ascertain whether there could be any truth in it.
“You fooled yourself that time, Buster,” announced George finally, and with a vein of positive relief in his voice; “it must have been the rain coming down like a cloud-burst, or else the wind tearing through some trees ashore.”
The action of the boat continued to cause more or less anxiety. Frequently when the wind struck savagely on the counter of the wallowing craft it would careen over so far that even Jack feared a catastrophe was impending.
Everything conspired to cause alarm—the darkness, the heavy crash of thunder, the blinding flashes of lightning that stabbed the gloom so suddenly, and the possibility of the boat turning turtle.