He could not get off. To stay seemed sure death. Dumb with fright, for a moment he stood in speechless terror. Then there rang across the wild, black river and through the quiet streets of the village, such a yell of abject fear as only a lusty lad of that age can give. It was a cry that chilled the heart of every one who heard it.
A "four-days' meeting" was in session. The village church-goers were just issuing from their houses in answer to the church bell, when that pitiful cry and the shouts of "Help! Help! A boy in the stream!" reached them, and drew them all quickly to the river bank.
In a few minutes the shore was lined with excited men and women. Yet all stood helplessly staring, while poor Jule on his ice-raft was floating steadily down toward the falls.
Never shall I forget how he looked as he stood there in the middle of his floating white throne! There was something almost heroic in his calm helplessness. For after the first wild cry, he had not once opened his lips.
Downward he floated, drawn swiftly and surely on by the deep, mighty rush of waters setting into the throat of the cataract. The heavy roar from far below sounded like the luckless lad's knell. He stood but a single chance—and that was hardly a chance—of his ice-raft lodging against a tilted-up "jam" of cakes and logs which had piled against a jagged ledge that rose in mid-stream, just above the brink of the precipice.
This "jam" had hung there, wavering in the flood, for thirty-six hours. Every moment it seemed about to go off—yet still it clung, in tremor, as it seemed, at the fatal plunge which would dash it to pieces in the thundering maelstrom below.
Good fortune—Providence, perhaps—so guided Jule's ice-raft that it struck and lodged against the "jam," just as the horrified watchers on shore expected to lose sight of the lad forever in the falls. "If it will only hang there!" muttered scores, scarcely daring as yet to speak a loud word.
They could see the cake, with Jule on it, heaving up and down with the mighty rhythmic motion of the surging torrent; and all ran along down the banks, to come nearer. The boy stood in the very jaws of death. Beneath, the cataract roared and hurled up white gusts of spray.
Just at this moment, a short, thick-set man, with a round, good-natured face, joined the crowd. For a moment he stood looking out at the lad, then slapping another young man on the shoulder, said, hurriedly, "Isn't there an old bateau stowed away in your shed, Lanse?"
"Yes," was the reply.