The boats were coming across again, straggling wide of each other; how quick, yet what an eternity in coming! The top-heavy boat with the red sail would be the first. It had been started long before the others. The wind caught it near the edge. It would turn over. No, it righted itself. It neared, it bobbed in the ripple at the brink; it touched.
Colonel Tempest's mind had become quite numb. He only knew that for some imperative reason which he had forgotten he must pull the trigger. He half pulled it; then again more decidedly.
There was a report. It stunned him back to a kind of consciousness of what he had done, but he felt nothing.
There was a great silence, and then a shrieking of terrified children, and a glimpse of agitated people close at hand, and others running towards him.
The man with the big boat under his arm said, "By gum!"
Colonel Tempest looked at him. He felt nothing. Had he failed?
The smoke came curling out at his collar, and something dropped from his nerveless hand and lay gleaming on the grass. There was a sound of many waters in his ears.
"He might have spared the children," said a man's voice, tremulous with indignation.
"That is always the way. No one thinks of me," thought Colonel Tempest. And the Round Pond and the growing crowd, and the child nearest him with its convulsed face, all turned slowly before his eyes, slid up, and disappeared.
