exhausted is the poor thing with fatigue and discomfort that,
were it not for his support, her insecure place would promptly know her
no more.

Another rise is topped, and now the river-bed lies before and beneath
them; and in truth the spectacle is enough to make the heart of the
timid or inexperienced traveller feel somewhat small. The stream is
indeed rolling yards high--a red, turbid flood coursing along some fifty
feet below, in the bottom of its bed--rearing its mighty masses up in
great hissing, crashing waves, rolling over tree-trunks and all kinds of
driftwood, with here and there a drowned bullock, whose branching horns
and ghastly staring eyes leap weirdly into view, immediately to be drawn
in and sucked under by the flood. And this wild, roaring, seething
horror--this crashing resistless current whose thunderous voice alone is
deafening, appalling--has to be crossed somehow.

"Nay, what! Can't even swim the horses through that!" says the driver,
Henry, as he descends from his seat, while a couple of Hottentot boys,
who have emerged from a squalid shanty by the roadside, are busy
outspanning. "We shall have to send over passengers and mails in the
box."

"Oh heavens!" faintly ejaculates the distressed fair one; "I can never
do it!"

"Oh yes you can!" says Roden, who has assisted her to alight. "It's
perfectly safe if you sit still and keep your head. Don't be in the
least afraid; I'll see you across all right."

She gives him a grateful glance, and answers that she will try. Seen as
she stands up she is a good-looking woman of about thirty, with light
brown hair and blue eyes. She is rather above the middle height, and
there is a piteous look in her white and travel-worn face, half
expressive of a consciousness of looking her worst, half of the mingled
apprehension and discomfort born of the situation.

"Go on up to the box, lady and gentlemen," says Henry, the post driver.
"I'll bring along your traps, and send 'em over with the mail-bags."

Roden recognises that if he is to get his charge, for such she has now
become, to cross at all, the less time she has to think about it the
better; wherefore he seconds this proposition, and accordingly they get
under way.

The bed of the river is some sixty feet deep by nearly twice that
distance in width, and, like that of most South African streams, in
ordinary weather is threaded by a comparative trickle. Such rivers,
however, after a few hours of