his tired and scattered
wits, he had stood his Winchester carefully upright between two spruce
saplings, filled his pipe, lighted it with relish, and seated himself
under the old birch where he could look straight down upon the
wheeling logs in Blackwater Pot.

It was while he was looking down into the terrible eddy that his
efforts to think failed him and his pipe went out, and his interest in
the fortunes of the captive logs gradually took the hold of a
nightmare upon his overwrought imagination. One after one he would
mark, snatched in by the capricious eddy and held back a little while
from its doom. One after one he would see crowded out again, by
inexplicable whim, and hurled on into the raging horror of the falls.
He fell to personifying this captive log or that, endowing it with
sentience, and imagining its emotions each time it circled shuddering
past the cleft in the rim, once more precariously reprieved.

At last, either because he was more deeply exhausted than he knew, or
because he had fairly dropped asleep with his eyes open and his
fantastic imaginings had slipped into a veritable dream, he felt
himself suddenly become identified with one of the logs. It was one
which was just drawing around to the fateful cleft. Would it win past
once more? No; it was too far out! It felt the grasp of the outward
suction, soft and insidious at first, then resistless as the falling
of a mountain. With straining nerves and pounding heart Henderson
strove to hold it back by sheer will and the wrestling of his eyes.
But it was no use. Slowly the head of the log turned outward from its
circling fellows, quivered for a moment in the cleft, then shot
smoothly forth into the sluice. With a groan Henderson came to his
senses, starting up and catching instinctively at the butt of the
heavy Colt in his belt. At the same instant the coil of a rope settled
over his shoulders, pinioning his arms to his sides, and he was jerked
backwards with a violence that fairly lifted him over the projecting
root of the birch. As he fell his head struck a stump; and he knew
nothing more.

When Henderson came to his senses he found himself in a most
bewildering position. He was lying face downwards along a log, his
mouth pressed upon the rough bark. His arms and legs were in the
water, on either side of the log. Other logs moved past him
sluggishly. For a moment he thought himself still in the grip of his
nightmare, and he struggled to wake hi