Lane steadied himself on the slippery ledge and got to his feet.  The boat was half full of water, out of which Swarm’s ghastly face protruded.  By dint of great effort Lane pulled it sideways on the ledge, and turned most of the water out.

Swann lay limp and sodden.  But for his eyes he would have appeared dead, and they shone with a conscious light of terror, of passionate appeal and hope, the look with which a man prayed for his life.  Presently his lips moved imperceptibly.  “Save me! for God’s sake, save me!”

Shuddering emotion that had the shock of electricity shook Lane.  In his ears again rang the sullen, hollow, reverberating boom of the flood.  Here was the man who had done most to harm him, begging to be saved.  Swann, poor wretch, was afraid to die; he feared the unknown; he had a terror of that seething turmoil of waters; he could not face the end of that cold ride.  Why?

“Fool!” Lane cried, glaring wildly about him.  Was it another dream?  Unreality swayed him again.  He heard the roar, he saw the splitting white-crested waves, the clouds of yellow vapor.  He beat his numb legs and shook himself like a savage dog.  Then he made a discovery—­in some way he could not account for, the oars had remained in the boat.  They had been loose in their oar-locks.

Questions formed in Lane’s mind, questions that seemed put by a dawning significance.  Why had he heard the cry for help?  Why had he found the boat?  Why had the drowning man proved to be one of two men on earth he hated, one of the two men whom he wanted to kill?  Why had he drifted into the rapids?  Why had he come safely through a vortex of death?  Why had Swann’s lips formed that prayer?  Why had the oars remained in the boat?

Far below over the choppy sea of waves he saw a bridge.  It was his old familiar resting place.  Through the white enveloping glow he seemed to see himself standing on that bridge.  Then came to him a strange revelation.  Yesterday he had stood on that bridge, after seeing Blair for the last time.  He had stood there while he lived through an hour of the keenest anguish that had come to him; and in that agony he had watched the plunging river.  He had watched it with eyes that could never forget.  His mind, exquisitely alive, with the sensibility of a plexus of racked and broken nerves, had taken up every line, every channel and stone and rapid of that flood, and had engraved them in ineffaceable characters.  With the unintelligible vagary of thought, while his breast seemed crushed, his heart broken, he had imagined himself adrift on that surging river, and he had planned his escape through the rapids.

As Lane stood on the ledge, knee-deep in the water, with the certainty that he had a perfect photograph of the field of tumbling waters below in his mind’s eye, a strange voice seemed to whisper in his ear.

"This is your great trial!"

Without further hesitation he shoved the boat off the ledge.