“What’s the matter?” Pierce inquired.

The pilot paid no heed; he began waving his cap in long sweeps, cursing meanwhile in a patois which the others could not understand.

Even while they stared at the Rouletta she drove head on into an expanse of tumbling breakers, then—­the onlookers could not believe their eyes—­she stopped dead still, as if she had come to the end of a steel cable or as if she had collided with an invisible wall.  Instantly her entire after part was smothered in white.  Slowly her bow rose out of the chaos until perhaps ten feet of her bottom was exposed, then she assumed a list.

The Countess uttered a strangled exclamation.  “Oh—­h!  Did you see?  There’s a man overboard!”

Her eyes were quick, but others, too, had beheld a dark bundle picked up by some mysterious agency and flung end over end into the waves.

The Rouletta’s deck-load was dissolving; a moment or two and she turned completely around, then drifted free.

“Why—­they brought the girl along!” cried the Countess, in growing dismay.  “Sam Kirby should have had better sense.  He ought to be hung—­”

From the tents and boats along the bank, from the village above, people were assembling hurriedly, a babel of oaths, of shouts arose.

’Poleon found his recent employer plucking at his sleeve.

“There’s a woman out there—­Kirby’s girl,” she was crying.  “Can’t you do something?”

“Wait!” He flung off her grasp and watched intently.

Soon the helpless scow was abreast of the encampment, and in spite of the frantic efforts of her crew to propel her shoreward she drifted momentarily closer to the cataract below.  Manifestly it was impossible to row out and intercept the derelict before she took the plunge, and so, helpless in this extremity, the audience began to stream down over the rounded boulders which formed the margin of the river.  On the opposite bank another crowd was keeping pace with the wreck.  As they ran, these people shouted at one another and gesticulated wildly.  Their faces were white, their words were meaningless, for it was a spectacle tense with imminent disaster that they beheld; it turned them sick with apprehension.

Immediately above White Horse the current gathers itself for the final plunge, and although, at the last moment, the Rouletta seemed about to straighten herself out and take the rapids head on, some malign influence checked her swing and she lunged over quarteringly to the torrent.

A roar issued from the throats of the beholders; the craft reappeared, and then, a moment later, was half hidden again in the smother.  It could be seen that she was completely awash and that those galloping white-maned horses were charging over her.  She was buffeted about as by battering-rams; the remainder of her cargo was being rapidly torn from her deck.  Soon another shout arose, for human figures could be seen still clinging to her.