"I'm coming—I—Cleek!" that voice rang out. "Hold your own—hold it to the last, Miss Lorne, and God help the man who lays a finger on you!"
"Mr. Cleek! Mr. Cleek, oh, thank God!" she flung back with all the rapture a human voice could contain. "Come on, come on! I've got him—got that man Merode, and the boy is safe, the boy is safe! Come on! come on! come on!"
"We're a-comin', miss, you gamble on that and the lightnin's a fool to us!" shouted Dollops in reply. "Let her have it, guv'ner! Bust the bloomin' tank. Give her her head; give her her feet; give her her blessed merry-thought if she wants it! Hurrah! hurrah! hurrah!"
And then, just then, when she most needed her strength and her courage, Ailsa's evaporated. The reaction came, and, with the despairing cries of Merode and Lanisterre ringing in her ears, she sank back, weak, white, almost fainting and, leaning against the side of the archway,
began to laugh and to sob hysterically. Merode seized that one moment and sprang to the breach.
Realizing that the game was all but up, that there was nothing for him now but to save his own skin if he could, he called out to Lanisterre to rip out the sparking plug of the motor and follow him, then plunged into the mill, swung over the lever which controlled the sluice gates, and, darting out by the back way, fled across the waste.
But behind him he left a scene of indescribable horror, and the shrill screaming of a little child told him when that horror began. For as the sluice gates opened a sullen roar sounded; on one side the diverted millstream, and on the other the river, rose as two solid walls of water, rushed forward and—met. In the twinkling of an eye the old water-course was one wild, leaping, roaring, gyrating whirlpool of up-flung froth and twisting waves that bore in their eddying clutch the battling figure of a drowning child.
Even before he came in sight of it the roaring waters and the fearful splash of their impact told Cleek what had been done. He could hear Ailsa's screams; he could hear the boy's feeble cries, and a moment later, when the whizzing motor panted up through the moonlight and sped by the broken wall, there was Ailsa, fairly palsied with fright, clinging weakly to the crumbling arch and uttering little sobbing, wordless, incoherent moans of fright as she stared down into the hell of waters; and below, in the foam, a little yellow head was spinning round and round and round, in dizzying circles of torn and leaping waves.
"Heavens, guv'ner!" began Dollops in a voice of appalling despair; but before he could get beyond that, Cleek's coat was off, Cleek's body had described a sort of semi-circle, and the child was no longer alone in the whirlpool!
Battling, struggling, fairly leaping, as a fish leaps in a torrent, one moment half out of the water, the next