But in that critical moment I saw something that set me on taking another resolution, and carrying it out too, all in an instant, as it were. We had been making, as I have said, for the gap in the reef, through which the sea flowed inwards very smoothly. Upon the reef itself the water was very much broken, more at some points than at others, and in that flash of time I had observed that the part nearest to us, on our right hand, appeared to lie some little distance below the surface, for the water above it was not near so restless and foam-crested as at some other parts. There were swells and eddies, indeed, but it seemed to me that the water was deep enough to take our vessel, and, as a drowning man will catch at a straw, I seized on this as a bare chance of escape. In the twinkling of an eye--for I saw and thought and acted all in a breath, so to speak--I thrust my paddle into the water at such an angle as would divert the canoe towards this part of the reef, telling Billy what I was about, and bidding him be ready for anything that might happen. The vessel's head swung round to the reef, we scudded across it with a scratching and scraping that made me shudder, and it was well I did not know then what I learnt from a mariner afterwards, how if we had struck upon any small pinnacle of hard coral we must have been overturned to a certainty; that knowledge might then have made a coward of me. But I did not know it, and we scraped and bumped across the reef, which was very narrow, and so came into the open sea, where, feeling the full force of the wind, we sped away right merrily. "You did that prime, master," says Billy, "and now I'll have a shot."