Even as he spoke, she suddenly remembered that the canal lay straight athwart their course. The canal, not level with the road, not clear, but fifteen feet lower, at the bottom of a stone embankment and landing-place for barges. The blood grew cold in her veins. During the brief frenzy of her alarm, the thought of the canal had not as much as occurred to her. It had been with Otto from the first.
And—even as he spoke—the violet line of the horizon deepened upon her eyes, where the white road struck dead against fields on the farther side. It turned at a right angle there, as she knew but too well, along the water.
“It’s as much as I can do to keep her head straight,” said Otto, almost in a whisper. “Another minute, and it will be too late! Ursula, can you help hold the reins for a moment without risk of falling out?”
“Yes!” she cried, vehemently, angry that he had not asked her five minutes sooner. For so the time seemed to her.
“It’s only for a moment,” he continued, “we’ve got beyond the side ditches now.” She saw that he was using the one hand he had freed to draw something from his trousers-pocket. Her grasp closed, near his other hand, on the reins: she thought that her arms were being drawn from their sockets, but she bit her white lips and held on. He knelt, as well as he could, on the carriage mat, bending over the broken splash-board, and she saw that he held a heavy revolver in his bleeding right hand. The glove was torn to ribbons.
“The instant I fire, drop the reins,” he said, quietly, “and hold on to the cart for dear life. It’s our only chance. God help me; we can’t—are you ready?”
“Yes,” she said, with staring eyes.
He had spoken the last question abruptly. In the still evening the line of the embankment already stood out. They were whirling towards it.
Again he bent forward, and fired. The shot missed, and as the report thundered around her and the reins fell loose on her sides, the mare seemed to rise into the air with the fierceness of her flight.
Immediately a second flash followed the first; the horse leaped up with a strain that snapped the shafts like two twigs, then fell, struck behind the right ear, a dead weight in the middle of the road.