he engine toppled, David jumped--there was no time to think,
obedience was the only way. After him sprang, far down into the
grey-blue water, Lacey and Mahommed. When they came again to the
surface, the little train with its handful of human freight had
disappeared.

Two people had seen the train plunge to destruction--the solitary
horseman whom David had watched kneel upon his sheepskin, and who now
from a far hill had seen the disaster, but had not seen the three jump
for their lives, and a fisherman on the bank, who ran shouting towards a
village standing back from the river.

As the fisherman sped shrieking and beckoning to the villagers, David,
Lacey, and Mahommed fought for their lives in the swift current,
swimming at an angle upstream towards the shore; for, as Mahommed warned
them, there were rocks below. Lacey was a good swimmer, but he was
heavy, and David was a better, but Mahommed had proved his merit in the
past on many an occasion when the laws of the river were reaching out
strong hands for him. Now, as Mahommed swam, he kept moaning to himself,
cursing his father and his father's son, as though he himself were to
blame for the crime which had been committed. Here was a plot, and
he had discovered more plots than one against his master. The
bridge-opener--when he found him he would take him into the desert and
flay him alive; and find him he would. His watchful eyes were on the hut
by the bridge where this man should be. No one was visible. He cursed
the man and all his ancestry and all his posterity, sleeping and waking,
until the day when he, Mahommed, would pinch his flesh with red hot
irons. But now he had other and nearer things to occupy him, for in
the fierce struggle towards the shore Lacey found himself failing, and
falling down the stream. Presently both Mahommed and David were beside
him, Lacey angrily protesting to David that he must save himself.

"Say, think of Egypt and all the rest. You've got to save yourself--let
me splash along!" he spluttered, breathing hard, his shoulders low in
the water, his mouth almost submerged.

But David and Mahommed fought along beside him, each determined that it
must be all or none; and presently the terror-stricken fisherman who
had roused the village, still shrieking deliriously, came upon them in a
flat-bottomed boat manned by four stalwart fellaheen, and the tragedy of
the bridge was over. But not the tragedy of Achmet the Ropemaker.

CHAPTER