He saw the tragedy almost before it had begun.  Still three hundred yards 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 racing toward it.  He climbed out on it, leaned far over, and reached down.  His hand touched the water.  In the grim excitement of rescue he forgot his own peril.  There was one chance in twenty that the colt would come within his reach, and it did.  He made a single lunge and caught it by the ear.  For a moment after that his heart turned sick.  Under the added strain the dead spruce sagged down with a warning crack.  But it held, and Aldous hung to his grip on the ear.  Foot by foot he wormed his way back, until at last he had dragged the little animal ashore.

And then a voice spoke behind him, a voice that he would have recognized among ten thousand, low, sweet, thrilling.

“That was splendid, John Aldous!” it said.  “If I were a man I would want to be a man like you!”