I threw myself upon him, flinging my arms about his waist and dragging him shorewards with all my strength.  Of course he struggled furiously, making a noise all the time just like that cursed humming, and using the most outlandish phrases in his anger about “going inside to Them,” and “taking the way of the water and the wind,” and God only knows what more besides, that I tried in vain to recall afterwards, but which turned me sick with horror and amazement as I listened.  But in the end I managed to get him into the comparative safety of the tent, and flung him breathless and cursing upon the mattress, where I held him until the fit had passed.

I think the suddenness with which it all went and he grew calm, coinciding as it did with the equally abrupt cessation of the humming and pattering outside—­I think this was almost the strangest part of the whole business perhaps.  For he just opened his eyes and turned his tired face up to me so that the dawn threw a pale light upon it through the doorway, and said, for all the world just like a frightened child: 

“My life, old man—­it’s my life I owe you.  But it’s all over now anyhow.  They’ve found a victim in our place!”

Then he dropped back upon his blankets and went to sleep literally under my eyes.  He simply collapsed, and began to snore again as healthily as though nothing had happened and he had never tried to offer his own life as a sacrifice by drowning.  And when the sunlight woke him three hours later—­hours of ceaseless vigil for me—­it became so clear to me that he remembered absolutely nothing of what he had attempted to do, that I deemed it wise to hold my peace and ask no dangerous questions.

He woke naturally and easily, as I have said, when the sun was already high in a windless hot sky, and he at once got up and set about the preparation of the fire for breakfast.  I followed him anxiously at bathing, but he did not attempt to plunge in, merely dipping his head and making some remark about the extra coldness of the water.

“River’s falling at last,” he said, “and I’m glad of it.”

“The humming has stopped too,” I said.

He looked up at me quietly with his normal expression.  Evidently he remembered everything except his own attempt at suicide.

“Everything has stopped,” he said, “because——­”

He hesitated.  But I knew some reference to that remark he had made just before he fainted was in his mind, and I was determined to know it.

“Because ’They’ve found another victim’?” I said, forcing a little laugh.

“Exactly,” he answered, “exactly!  I feel as positive of it as though—­as though—­I feel quite safe again, I mean,” he finished.

He began to look curiously about him.  The sunlight lay in hot patches on the sand.  There was no wind.  The willows were motionless.  He slowly rose to feet.

“Come,” he said; “I think if we look, we shall find it.”