I observed casually that the oarsman was gazing fixedly at Leanor. Even on him, perhaps, beauty was not entirely lost. Doubtless, too, he had heard the gossip her arrival had set going along the wharves at Batoga. Meanwhile Leanor had made a discovery.
“Why, we’re still making headway!” she broke out suddenly. “I—I thought we had stopped.”
Sisson glanced down at the water, and his tanned brow broke up in vertical wrinkles of consternation. The look in his deepset eyes, though, did not, oddly enough, seem to match the perplexity written on his corrugated brow.
Our craft was sliding rapidly forward as though propelled by the oars. The phenomenon was due to a current; that much was certain, for we were moving with a flotsam of dead leaves and seaweed.
Again I screwed my body half round in the cramped bow and shot a glance ahead. God! we were shooting toward the dread spot on the alkali cliff as though drawn to it by an unseen magnet. I could see, too, that our speed was rapidly increasing.
Sisson snatched up the trailing oars and put his giant’s strength against the invisible something that seemed dragging us by the keel, but all he did was to plough two futile furrows in the strange whirlpool. Our cayuco glided on.
The blasé adventuress was never more beautiful. For the time, at least, life, warm and pulsating, had come back and clasped her in a joyous embrace. Her lips were parted in a smile of seemingly inexpressible delight. There was not the remotest suggestion of surprise or fear in her girlish face.
She put her helm over only when I shouted to her in wide-eyed alarm, but the keen, finlike keel of our specially built cayuco obviously did not respond. Oblique in the channel, we slithered over, ever nearer to the west wall, the unseen agent of destruction towing us with awful certainty toward the vortex. Still the surface of the water, moving with us, looked as motionless as a mill-pond! It was uncanny, nothing less.
I peered into the bluishly transparent depths, fascinated with wonder, and then, of a sudden, I saw that which alone might prove our salvation. Apparently we were in a writhing, powerful current, racing atop the seemingly placid undersea or sub-surface waters of the channel. I could make out many small objects spinning merrily about as they flew, submerging, toward the whirlpool.
We carried six life-belts. Two of these I snatched from their fastenings, slipped one about Leanor, and with the other but partly adjusted—for there remained no time—myself plunged out of our—as it were—bewitched craft in the direction of the west wall.