It was the end, and Barry sat bolt erect and looked around
him; that would be the last of him and the last scene he should see.
There came the posse, distant but running closer. With every stride Satan
staggered; with every stride his head drooped, and all the lilt of his
running was gone. Ten minutes, five minutes more and the fifteen would be
around him. He looked to the river which thundered there at his side.
It was the very swiftest portion of all the Asper between Tucker Creek and
Caswell City. Even at that moment, a few hundred yards away, a tall tree
which had been undermined, fell into the stream and dashed the spray high;
yet even that fall was silent in the general roar of the river. Checked by
the body and the branches of the tree for an instant before it should be
torn away from the bank and shot down stream, the waters boiled and left a
comparatively smooth, swift sliding current beyond the obstruction; and it
gave to Barry a chance or a ghost of a chance:
The central portion of the river bed was chopped with sharp rocks which
tore the stream into white rages of foam; but beyond these rocks, a little
past the middle, the tree like a dam smoothed out the current; it was still
swift but not torn with swirls or cross-currents, and in that triangle of
comparatively still water of which the base was the fallen tree, the apex
lay on a sand bar, jutting a few yards from the bank.
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