ALIVE!
When Rosamond Arleigh struck the water in her mad descent down the steep sandy bank, she gave herself up for lost.
The cold, dark water closed swiftly over her, and she sunk for a moment out of sight; then she rose to the surface, and with numbed hands clutched wildly at the nearest object, even as the drowning man will clutch at a straw. Her hands came in contact with a huge pine log. She grasped its rough bark; her hands slipped, and she fell once more.
She had lost her slippers—one was in the carriage, the other imbedded in the wet sand near the edge of the stream. Her cloak had slipped from her shoulders; she was utterly unprotected from the cold water, and a chill struck to her very heart.
It was intensely dark. She could not see which way the carriage had gone; but it had gone, and that was enough to revive a feeble hope within her heart.
If only Gilbert Warrington would not miss her until he was so far away that she might have time and a chance to escape, then indeed there was hope. But how could she escape?
It was dark and cold; the stream was deep and treacherous, and the current swift and strong. Besides, the logs and débris in the water choked up its course, and it was positively dangerous for an expert swimmer to attempt to make his way through the swift, dark tide, at that hour.
It all flashed through her bewildered brain with the rapidity with which thought flashes at such a time, when one is upon the verge of drowning. She tried hard to grasp the situation, but her brain was weak and numb from the strange experience through which she had passed, and she could not collect her thoughts, nor do anything to help herself; only, with a vague impulse of self-preservation, the first law of nature, she struck out blindly, with a faint hope of reaching shore.
Clutching at the tall, tough grass and native shrubs which grew near, she might have eventually succeeded, for she was desperate; but all at once, with a rush and a roar and a plunge down the stream, a small raft of cypress logs fastened together came tearing madly, under the direction of a stout negro in a small boat, who evidently superintended the raft.
On came the logs, and poor Rosamond, directly in their way, was utterly powerless to escape, while the negro in the boat could not possibly see what was ahead of him; and, of course, he would not be on the lookout for such a phenomenon as a woman struggling in the cold, dark water alone at that unearthly hour.