below the swimming horses was the gravelly bar which they must reach on the
opposite side. He noted the grayish strip of smooth water that marked the
end of the dead-line. Three or four of the stronger animals were forging
steadily toward this. The others grouped close together, almost motionless
in their last tremendous fight, were left farther and farther behind. Then
came the break. A mare and her yearling colt had gone in with the bunch.
Aldous saw the colt, with its small head and shoulders high out of the
water, sweep down like a chip with the current. A cold chill ran through
him as he heard the whinneying scream of the mother--a warning cry that
held for him the pathos and the despair of a creature that was human. He
knew what it meant. "Wait--I'm coming--I'm coming!" was in that cry. He saw
the mare give up and follow resistlessly with the deadly current, her eyes
upon her colt. The heads behind her wavered, then turned, and in another
moment the herd was sweeping down to its destruction.

Aldous felt like turning his head. But the spectacle fascinated him, and he
looked. He did not think of Stevens and his loss as the first of the herd
plunged in among the rocks. He stood with white face and clenched hands,
leaning over the water boiling at his feet, cursing softly in his
helplessness. To him came the last terrible cries of the perishing animals.
He saw head after head go under. Out of the white spume of a great rock
against which the flood split itself with the force of an avalanche he saw
one horse pitched bodily, as if thrown from a huge catapault. The last
animal had disappeared when chance turned his eyes upstream and close in to
shore. Here flowed a steady current free of rock, and down this--head and
shoulders still high out of the water--came the colt! What miracle had
saved the little fellow thus far Aldous did not stop to ask. Fifty yards
below it would meet the fate of the others. Half that distance in the
direction of the maelstrom below was the dead trunk of a fallen spruce
overhanging the water for fifteen or twenty feet. In a flash Aldous was