re rewarded him. Instead, the river at that point swept
inward, so that the full force of the current washed the very shores.

Bob searched the prospect with eager eye. Twelve or fifteen feet
upstream, and six or seven feet out from the cliff, stood a huge round
boulder. That alone broke the shadowy expanse of the river, which here
rushed down with great velocity. Manifestly it was impossible to swim to
this boulder. Bob, however, conceived a daring idea. At imminent risk
and by dint of frantic scrambling he worked his way along the cliff
until he had gained a point opposite the boulder and considerably above
it. Then, without hesitation, he sprang as strongly as he was able
sidewise from the face of the cliff.

He landed on the boulder with great force, so that for a moment he
feared he must have broken some bones. Certainly his breath was all but
knocked from his body. Spread out flat on the top of the rock, he moved
his limbs cautiously. They seemed to work all right. He backed
cautiously until he lay outspread on the upstream slope of the boulder.
At just this moment he caught the sinister figure of Saleratus Bill
moving along the sunken ledge.

For the first time Bob remembered the tracks he must have left and the
man's skill at trailing. A rapid review of his most recent actions
reassured him at one point; in order to gain to the first of the minor
cliff projections by means of which he had spread-eagled along the face
of the rock, he had been forced to step into the very shallow water at
the stream's edge. Thus his last footprints led directly into the river.

The value of this impression, conjoined with the existence of a ledge
below over which he had already waded safely, was not lost on Bob's
preception. As has been stated, his earlier experience in river driving
had given him an intimate knowledge of the action of currents. Casting
his eye hastily down the moonlit river, he seized his hat from his head
and threw it low and skimming toward an eddy opposite him as he lay. The
river snatched it up, tossed it to one side or another, and finally
carried it, as Bob had calculated, within a few feet of the ledge along
which Saleratus Bill was still making his way.

The gun-man, of course, caught sight of it, and even made an attempt to
capture it as it floated past, but without avail. It served, however, to
prepossess his mind with the idea that Bob had been swept away by the
river, so that when, after a careful