g the spacious window. The dogs barked
outrageously; but at last above their din floated, as before, the high
wailing cries. A heaping cairn of round-bellied, rosy-pink earthen jars
came steering past, poled by a naked statue of new copper, who balanced
precariously on the edge of his hidden raft. No sound came from him; nor
from the funeral barge which floated next, where still figures in white
robes guarded the vermilion drapery of a bier, decked with vivid green
boughs. All these were silent.

"No, above!" cried Rudolph, pointing.

After the mourners' barge, at some distance, came hurrying a boat
crowded with shining yellow bodies and dull blue jackets. Long bamboo
poles plied bumping along her gunwale, sticking into the air all about
her, many and loose and incoordinate, like the ribs of an unfinished
basket. From the bow spurted a white puff of smoke. The dull report of a
musket lagged across the water.

The bullet skipped like a schoolboy's pebble, ripping out little rags of
white along that surface of liquid clay.

The line of fire thus revealed, revealed the mark. Untouched, a black
head bobbed vigorously in the water, some few yards before the boat. The
saffron crew, poling faster, yelled and cackled at so clean a miss,
while a coolie in the bow reloaded his matchlock.

The fugitive head labored like that of a man not used to swimming, and
desperately spent. It now gave a quick twist, and showed a distorted
face, almost of the same color with the water.

The mouth gaped black in a sputtering cry, then closed choking,
squirted out water, and gaped once more, to wail clearly:--

"I am Jesus Christ!"

In the broad, bare daylight of the river, this lonely and sudden
blasphemy came as though a person in a dream might declare himself to a
waking audience of skeptics. The cry, sharp with forlorn hope, rang like
an appeal.

"Why--look," stammered Heywood. "He sees us--heading here. Look,
it's--Quick! let me out!"

Just as he turned to elbow through his companions, and just as the cry
sounded again, the matchlock blazed from the bow. No bullet skipped. The
swimmer, who had reached the shallows, suddenly rose with an incredible
heave, like a leaping salmon, flung one bent arm up and back in the
gesture of the Laocooen, and pitched forward with a turbid splash. The
quivering darkness under the banyan blotted everything: death had
dispersed the black minnows there, in oozy wriggles of shadow; but next
moment t