The Countess uttered a strangled exclamation. "Oh—h! Did you see?
There's a man overboard!"
Her eyes were quick, but others, too, had beheld a dark bundle picked up by some mysterious agency and flung end over end into the waves.
The Rouletta's deck-load was dissolving; a moment or two and she turned completely around, then drifted free.
"Why—they brought the GIRL along!" cried the Countess, in growing dismay. "Sam Kirby should have had better sense. He ought to be hung—"
From the tents and boats along the bank, from the village above, people were assembling hurriedly, a babel of oaths, of shouts arose.
'Poleon found his recent employer plucking at his sleeve.
"There's a woman out there—Kirby's girl," she was crying. "Can't you do something?"
"Wait!" He flung off her grasp and watched intently.
Soon the helpless scow was abreast of the encampment, and in spite of the frantic efforts of her crew to propel her shoreward she drifted momentarily closer to the cataract below. Manifestly it was impossible to row out and intercept the derelict before she took the plunge, and so, helpless in this extremity, the audience began to stream down over the rounded boulders which formed the margin of the river. On the opposite bank another crowd was keeping pace with the wreck. As they ran, these people shouted at one another and gesticulated wildly. Their faces were white, their words were meaningless, for it was a spectacle tense with imminent disaster that they beheld; it turned them sick with apprehension.
Immediately above White Horse the current gathers itself for the final plunge, and although, at the last moment, the Rouletta seemed about to straighten herself out and take the rapids head on, some malign influence checked her swing and she lunged over quarteringly to the torrent.