reak. A mare and her yearling colt had gone in with the bunch.
Aldous saw the colt, with its small head and shoulders high out of the
water, sweep down like a chip with the current. A cold chill ran through
him as he heard the whinneying scream of the mother--a warning cry that
held for him the pathos and the despair of a creature that was human. He
knew what it meant. "Wait--I'm coming--I'm coming!" was in that cry. He saw
the mare give up and follow resistlessly with the deadly current, her eyes
upon her colt. The heads behind her wavered, then turned, and in another
moment the herd was sweeping down to its destruction.

Aldous felt like turning his head. But the spectacle fascinated him, and he
looked. He did not think of Stevens and his loss as the first of the herd
plunged in among the rocks. He stood with white face and clenched hands,
leaning over the water boiling at his feet, cursing softly in his
helplessness. To him came the last terrible cries of the perishing animals.
He saw head after head go under. Out of the white spume of a great rock
against which the flood split itself with the force of an avalanche he saw
one horse pitched bodily, as if thrown from a huge catapault. The last
animal had disappeared when chance turned his eyes upstream and close in to
shore. Here flowed a steady current free of rock, and down this--head and
shoulders still high out of the water--came the colt! What miracle had
saved the little fellow thus far Aldous did not stop to ask. Fifty yards
below it would meet the fate of the others. Half that distance in the
direction of the maelstrom below was the dead trunk of a fallen spruce
overhanging the water for fifteen or twenty feet. In a flash Aldous was
racing toward it. He climbed out on it, leaned far over, and reached down.
His hand touched the water. In the grim excitement of rescue he forgot his
own peril. There was one chance in twenty that the colt would come within
his reach, and it did. He made a single lunge and caught it by the ear. For
a moment after that his heart turned sick. Under the added strain the dead
spruce sagged down with a warning crack. But it held, and Aldous hung to
his grip on the ear. Foot by foot he wormed his way back, until at last he
had dragged the little animal ashore.

And then a voice spoke behind him, a voice that he would have recognized
among ten thousand, low, sweet, thrilling.

"That was splendid, John Aldous!" it said. "If I were a man I w