Bob searched the prospect with eager eye.  Twelve or fifteen feet upstream, and six or seven feet out from the cliff, stood a huge round boulder.  That alone broke the shadowy expanse of the river, which here rushed down with great velocity.  Manifestly it was impossible to swim to this boulder.  Bob, however, conceived a daring idea.  At imminent risk and by dint of frantic scrambling he worked his way along the cliff until he had gained a point opposite the boulder and considerably above it.  Then, without hesitation, he sprang as strongly as he was able sidewise from the face of the cliff.

He landed on the boulder with great force, so that for a moment he feared he must have broken some bones.  Certainly his breath was all but knocked from his body.  Spread out flat on the top of the rock, he moved his limbs cautiously.  They seemed to work all right.  He backed cautiously until he lay outspread on the upstream slope of the boulder.  At just this moment he caught the sinister figure of Saleratus Bill moving along the sunken ledge.

For the first time Bob remembered the tracks he must have left and the man’s skill at trailing.  A rapid review of his most recent actions reassured him at one point; in order to gain to the first of the minor cliff projections by means of which he had spread-eagled along the face of the rock, he had been forced to step into the very shallow water at the stream’s edge.  Thus his last footprints led directly into the river.

The value of this impression, conjoined with the existence of a ledge below over which he had already waded safely, was not lost on Bob’s preception.  As has been stated, his earlier experience in river driving had given him an intimate knowledge of the action of currents.  Casting his eye hastily down the moonlit river, he seized his hat from his head and threw it low and skimming toward an eddy opposite him as he lay.  The river snatched it up, tossed it to one side or another, and finally carried it, as Bob had calculated, within a few feet of the ledge along which Saleratus Bill was still making his way.

The gun-man, of course, caught sight of it, and even made an attempt to capture it as it floated past, but without avail.  It served, however, to prepossess his mind with the idea that Bob had been swept away by the river, so that when, after a careful examination of the tiny cove, he came to the trail leading into the water, he was prepared to believe that the young man had been carried off his feet in an attempt to wade out past the cliff.  He even picked up a branch, with which he poked at the bottom.  A short and narrow rock projection favoured his hypothesis, for it might very well happen that merely an experimental venture on so slanting and slippery a footing would prove fatal.  Saleratus Bill examined again for footprints emerging; threw his branch into the river, and watched the direction of its course; and then, for the first time, slipped the worn and shiny old revolver into its holster.  He spent several moments more reexamining the cove, glanced again at the river, and finally disappeared, wading slowly back around the sunken ledge.