he had warned him—he had even suspected that that final warning was a trap.

Ah, there he was straight ahead of him; he could see him distinctly now. The moon, rising clear of cloud, made his figure plain. He called to him, and it seemed that he half-turned his head. He was keeping perilously near in to the bend. He called to him again, and signed to him with his arms to drive out. Then once more a cloud passed before the moon, making the land seem dead.

He advanced cautiously, moving slowly, testing the strength of the ice at each fresh step before trusting 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,[106] 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.

[106]

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 

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