it with his weight. Underneath he
could hear the lapping of the current as it rushed rapidly round the
bend, and could feel the trembling of the crust beneath his feet, as a
man does the vibration of an Atlantic liner when the engines are
working at full pressure, and every plank and bolt begins to shake and
speak. When he had come to where Strangeways had been standing, he
stood still and listened. He could hear no sound of travel, no
cursing a man's voice, urging his dogs forward, or cracking of a whip.
Then he felt the ice sagging from under him, and the cold touch of
water creeping round his moccasins. From a rift in the cloud, a
segment of the moon looked out. Before and behind him lay the frozen
expanse of river, with its piled-up banks on either hand, and its
heavy blanketing of snow, smooth and level, making its passage seem
safe. Far over to the right stretched the trail of Spurling, showing
ugly and black against the white, where his steps and the steps of his
dogs had punctured the surface. Just before him, three yards distant,
the ice had broken open, leaving a gaping hole over whose jagged edges
the water climbed, and whimpered, and fell back, like a fretful child
in its cot, which has wakened too early and is trying to clamber out.

As Granger watched, heedless of his own safety, a hand pushed out
above the current, the hooked fingers of which searched gropingly for
something to which they might make fast. Granger, throwing himself
flat in the snow, so as to distribute his weight, crawled towards it.
The hand rose higher, and then the arm, followed at last by the head
and eyes of Strangeways, but not the mouth. He had caught hold of a
point of ice and was trying to pull himself up by that; but something
(was it the swiftness of the current?) was dragging his body away from
under him so that the water was still above his nose and mouth.
Granger wormed his way to within arm-stretch and clasped his hand; but
the moment he commenced to pull, the weight became terrific--more than
the weight of one man--and he himself began to slide slowly forward
till his head and shoulders were above the water. Something was
tugging at Strangeways from below the river, so that his body jerked
and quivered like a fisherman's line when a well-hooked salmon is
endeavouring to make a rush at the other end.

Granger was leaning far out now, the surface was curving from under
him and his chest had left the ice. Then he realised wha