After a while he heard a plashing in the water, which was not that of the rain.  He thought it must be the sound of a canoe-paddle.  Could anybody row against such a torrent?  But he distinctly heard the plashing, and it was below him.  Even Katy roused herself to listen, and strained her eyes against the blackness of the night to discover what it might be.  It did not grow any nearer.  It did not retreat.  At the end of ten minutes this irregular but distinct dipping sound, which seemed to be in some way due to human agency, was neither farther nor nearer, neither slower nor more rapid than at first.  Albert hallooed again and again at it, but the mysterious cause of this dipping and dashing was deaf to all cries for help.  Or if not deaf, this oarsman seemed as incapable of giving reply as the “dumb old man” that rowed the “lily maid of Astolat” to the palace of Arthur.

But it was no oarsman, not even a dumb one.  The lightning for which Albert prayed came at last, and illumined the water and the shores, dispelling all dreams of canoe or oarsman.  Charlton saw in an instant that there was a fence a few rods away, and that where the fence crossed the stream, or crossed from bank to bank of what was the stream at its average stage, long poles had been used, and one of these long and supple poles was now partly submerged.  The swift current bent it in the middle until it would spring out of the water and drop back higher up.  It was thus kept in a rotary motion, making the sound which he had mistaken for the paddling of a canoeman.  With this discovery departed all thought of human help from that quarter.

But with the dissipating of the illusion came a new hope.  Charlton turned the head of the horse back and drove him out of the water, or at least to a part of the meadow where the overflowed water did not reach to his knees.  Here he tied him to a tree, and told Katy she must stay alone until he should cross the stream and find help, if help there should be, and return.  It might take him half an hour.  But poor Katy said that she could not live half an hour longer in this rain.  And, besides, she knew that Albert would be drowned in crossing.  So that it was with much ado that he managed to get away from her, and, indeed, I think she cried after he had gone.  He called back to her when he got to the brook’s bank, “All right, Katy!” but Katy heard him through the roar of the rain, and it seemed to her that he was being swallowed up in a Noachian deluge.

Charlton climbed along on the precarious footing afforded by the submerged pole, holding to the poles above while the water rushed about his feet.  These poles were each of them held by a single large nail at each end, and the support was doubly doubtful.  He might fall off, or the nails might come out.  Even had he not been paralyzed by long exposure to the cold, he could have no hope of being able to swim in such a torrent.