That was all he thought about in his dazed condition, and without making an attempt to reach either shore he drifted with the sluggish current for twenty yards or so. Then he saw a conical rock close ahead, rising several feet out of mid-stream, and by an effort he reached it and clasped both arms around the top.
There he clung for fully five minutes, while strength returned and his mind cleared. He had not heard a sound since he fell, and he wondered if all his companions were dead. He listened in vain, looking up at the distant blue vault of the sky. The silence of death rested on wood and stream.
A sharp pain suddenly recalled the fact that he had been shot, and he put one hand to his head in a fever of apprehension. His fingers were red with blood when he looked at them, but his fear was gone. The bullet had merely grazed his brow, leaving a narrow skin wound.
This discovery put new life into Nathan, and he determined to get to shore and search for his friends, if they were still alive. But as he was about to let go of the rock he heard a noise from the north bank, in which direction he was facing. Here the slope was less precipitous than above, and was heavily timbered.
Some person was descending toward the stream at a recklessly rapid speed. Loosened stones rolled down to the water with a splash. Here and there amid the trees and bushes a dark form showed at intervals. Was it friend or foe? Nathan asked himself, and all too soon the question was answered.
The noise suddenly ceased, and from out the fringe of laurel at the base of the slope peered a man's face—a hideous countenance with but one eye, and with skin like wrinkled parchment slashed by a quillful of purple ink. It needed not a glimpse of a dingy buckskin jacket with horn buttons to tell Nathan that this was the terrible Simon Glass.
The face was followed by a long-barrelled musket, but the ruffian did not at once raise it to his shoulder. He stared keenly at the lad for a moment, and then grinned like a fiend.
"No mistake about it, that's him," he muttered aloud. "Die, you dirty rebel," he added, levelling the gun and squinting along the tube with his one eye.
Nathan heard the first words so indistinctly that they caused him no wonder, but the sentence that followed chilled his very blood. He could neither move nor utter a sound as he faced the death that seemed certain. A spell was upon him. He was charmed into helplessness by the musket's black mouth—by the ghastly grin on the one-eyed Tory's face.
A few seconds slipped by, and they were like so many minutes to the tortured lad. Then, just as Glass pressed the trigger, a fusillade of musketry rang out from some point up the bluff. Bang! went the Tory's gun, but the surprise of the shooting overhead had fortunately spoilt his aim. The bullet hit the rock within two inches of Nathan's face, and a shower of splintered chips flew around him.