Two sections of the footbridge held the body wedgelike, but the face and breast were awash. Mose fell to his knees and tried to turn and lift the face from the water. "Mo’sieur," he said, in an agony of entreaty and fear, "Mo’sieur, you can’ be hurt mooch." But there was no answer. "Mo’sieur," he repeated, and shifted his arm lower to raise the submerged breast; "Monjee, mo’sieur, you mus’ help yourself, some." Still no response; and the boy made no further attempt to rouse him, for he had felt, suddenly, the grip of the hemlock. He withdrew his arm, and, cuffing aside one of the snuffing hounds, laid his hand on the neck of the other and rose. Then he took breath and lifted his voice in a great shout. The dogs swelled it, belling a prolonged note. He listened and repeated the call with his palm to his mouth. This time it brought a faint reply from Laramie, and the hounds sounded a louder clarion. And the storming Des Chutes swept away the deep, full-throated cry, and the speaking hills caught it and sent it back like a lament from far promontories. *CHAPTER XXX* *THE LOST PROSPECT* Below the falls the overflow had formed a backwater through the meadow, and that Saturday morning Alice took the Jerseys from the higher ground of the home enclosure, and put them to graze on the slope. She intended to ride directly on to the Station for the mail, and made a short cut through the park to strike the trail beyond the first knoll. It was then, while the black paced slowly among the wet trees, that the sound of the landslide clashed through the hills. Colonel stopped, trembling; hoofs planted, head up, nostrils wide and quivering, then, panic driven, broke. A little later, when she had drawn him down, and still quieting him, turned again towards the trail, Stratton’s horse, arrested by the washed out bridge on his way to the lodge, thundered back in the direction of the Nisqually. There was a flash of the chestnut coat between the branches; a glimpse of the empty saddle and he was gone. But instantly Alice saw that Stratton had returned. He had, of course, taken the branch through the canyon and the thoroughbred had refused the swollen ford; he had bolted, skirting the submerged jungle to the main trail, and left his master unhorsed, perhaps hurt, at the crossing. She turned and rode back towards the gorge, expecting to pick up the trail at the foot of the bluff, where it wound down from the tower. "It’s all right, Colonel," she said, "it’s all right. You ought to know a slide by this time. But I don’t blame you; it was a monster; it sounded like the whole canyon wall coming down."