Sometimes a sudden belief that he really had had some faint indication of his bearings would make him put all his young strength into the paddle, until once more a soft, yielding, yet irresistible, impact came to tell him that he had failed again, that he was on another sandbank, and another, and another! The dull concussion of them seemed to pass into his brain; he found himself fumbling on almost aimlessly, despite his doggedness, his mind busy with imagining the things which might be happening in the dark around him. For all he knew close by-- There lay the sting! It was suffocating to be set, as it were, in the solid darkness like--he thought of a fly in amber, the birds he had limed in his boyhood, finally of a death mask. That was more like it--he felt as the corpse must feel--clogged, hampered, helpless! In such conditions minutes seem hours; and Lance, in reality, had not been drifting about for half of one before the certainty that his mission must inevitably be useless unless he could fulfil it more expeditiously, made him resolve on trying conclusions with the river at first hand. He was a good swimmer. As he told himself this, the first pulse of gratitude he had ever felt for the big bully who had chucked him, a small boy in his first term at Harrow, into "Ducker" to take his chance, came to him; for those few minutes of despairing effort had taught him more than mere swimming; they had taught him to trust himself in water. More, at any rate, than in a beastly contrivance made of beds and footballs, with no stem, no stern, and a devilish habit of spinning in every eddy like a teetotum! The mere condemnation of Am-ma's craft, being a prelude to better things, raised his spirits. He flung off his clothes, and, knowing he could not hope to keep his revolver dry, improvised a waistcloth out of the silk sash he wore instead of a waistcoat, in which to stick the hunting-knife that was his only other weapon. As he did so, he thought of the deer the knife had killed; as men think idly, irrelevantly, of such trivialities when their attention is really concentrated on something that is, as yet, outside experience. And Lance, as he slipped into the water, knew himself prepared to swim or wade, but knew nothing else. So, doggedly as before, and infinitely quicker, he went on through the darkness; sometimes feeling himself in the cool water, sometimes finding his feet on warm sand, sometimes parting a way, he knew not where, through the low tamarisk and high grass marking an island. If he could have guessed which island, or even known which way his face was set, these light swishing touches might have been guides; but he knew nothing. Until, after a time, a faint far glow, a mere suspicion of something not outer darkness, showed on his left. Even so, he could not guess whether that meant the gaol side, or the city side of the rivers. If the former, could the gaol have been fired by those devils?