The Argosy, Vol. XXIV, No. 3 — page 192: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

576 OVER THE DANGER LINE. in my ears; this fear to even breathe, lest the balance of the beat might be affected ; this dearth of motion, where all around, foaming, gliding water, the drifting spray, the dancing trees, the oscillating shores, the flying clouds, were instinct with motion—this was the most dreadful strain I was ever called upon to endure. I think all might have been well had I been able to control myself for a few moments longer, but driven to frenzy with the consciousness of my own helplessness, I urged my companion to still greater exertion. A moment of iicreased effort, the sound of a splintering car, the cry of horror from my companion, the sensation of suspended motion, of the boat being whirled round in the powerful grasp of the current like a top, the ominous impelling force pushing us on with ever increasing speed—those were incidents that followed each other with a rapidity that dazed all our faculties. Our eyes met, and the same story must have been written there, for we both involuntarily spoke the one word that expressed all: ‘Lost !”’ In spite of the hurry of events, and the confusion to our senses, the scene of that summer evening is so indelibly fixed upon my memory that nothing but death can efface it. After years the picture often comes to me in all its appalling splendor, and I feel myself drifting down, down toward the awful precipice. My friend had retained his grasp of the remaining oar, and it was pro- bably this that gave to our boat a sort of revolving motion. One moment we would be whirled round till dizzy, then swept forward, and over some sharp decline where the spray would envelop us like a cloud, and cause us to gasp for breath: Again, we would veer to one side of a huge boulder that reared itself in midstream, impregnable against the assaults of the raging torrent. ‘Tossed here and there on the foam capped waves, each of which hid an outcropping rock, it was little short of miraculous that our boat was not dashed to pieces. We had but a vague notion of our location. Indeed, it mattered little to us, since the end was one—an appalling plunge to death. Suddenly we felt the forward end of the boat caught by some obstruction. Almost instantly it swung around as on a pivot, with a violence that is inde- scribable. It released itself, was’afloat for a moment, then struck broadside against an obstruction further on. ‘This time the boat held fast. Our mo- mentum had been so great that we were nearly stunned by the shock. We almost instantly recovered ourselves, and the incidents that contributed to our deliverance dawned upon us. We were stranded upon the upper end of Luna Island, which, with Goat Isiand, is at the very brink of the preci- pice. Our boat had first caught on some projection from a little nameless island, only a few feet in diameter, and about fifty feet up stream from Luna. Almost any day, the visitor on Luna Island mnay see stranded logs and drift lying on the very spot where our boat was landed ; sO one may see in our deliverance neither the impossible nor miraculous. But who will say that, behind all the innumerable forces that bore our boat onward to appar- ent doom, there was not a Directing Hand ? Ly. Z. Burns. =) (C@) DOOKS.COin