Then a swift change passed over his face.
"Ha! ha! There's the light again," he cried exultantly. "Look, Carrington, look——" His lips trembled over the unfinished sentence, and without another word he dropped back on the logs and lay there perfectly motionless.
This was the last thing that Guy remembered.
The torch still burned beside him, and the raft plunged on its dizzy course, but his mind was wandering far away, and the past was being lived over again.
He was riding through London streets, dining with his old friends at the club, pulling a skiff over the placid current of the Thames, shooting quail on his brother's estate, dancing at a ball at Government House, Calcutta, marching through Indian jungles at the head of his men, plotting the capture of the Rajah, Nana Sahib, in far-away Burma—thus the merciful past stole his mind away from the horrors of the present, and he alternately smiled or shuddered as he recalled some pleasant association or stern reminiscence of peril.
So the hours passed on. The torch faded and dimmed, burned to a charred ember, and then went out.
The water hissed and boiled, crashing on rocks and shoals, beating its fury against the barren shores, and rushing down the narrow channel at an angle that was frightful and appalling.
Guided by an unseen power, the frail raft rose and fell with the current, whirling round and round like an eggshell, creaking, groaning, and straining at its bonds, like a fettered giant; but the wretched castaways, sprawled in careless attitude across the logs, heard nothing, knew nothing—simply lay with their pallid faces turned toward the blackness and the gloom overhead.
Ah, how pitiful! If they could only have known what was close at hand, fresh life would have flowed into their wasted veins. They would have gone mad with joy.
The roar of the water had now become softened and less violent. The rocks had disappeared, the river slipped like an avalanche through the fast narrowing channel, and at such a prodigious speed that a cold blast of air whistled about the raft.