A blinding glare, a thunderous detonation that seemed to shatter his every nerve, and he was weltering in the river; now sinking down with a sense of the weight of infinite fathoms of water upon him, and now mechanically trying to strike out with an unreasoning instinct like an animal’s. When he could understand what had happened he was swimming fairly well, although greatly hampered by the clinging blazer that John Grayson had left on the floor, and which he now wore. The long reaches of the river, the shore, the dim dawn, were all lighted with a lurid glare; for the boat had taken fire with the explosion of the overstrained boiler. The roar of the flames mingled with the heart-rending screams of those whom hope had so cruelly deluded. But the sounds were all faint at the distance, and he never could understand how he had been thrown, unhurt, so far away. He saw none of the human victims of the disaster. Now and again charred timbers, shooting by on the current, threatened him, and to avoid them necessitated some skillful management. A far greater danger was the proximity of two horses, also gallantly swimming, who followed him with loud whinnies of inquiry and distress, appealing in their way for aid and guidance, leaning on the humankind as if recognizing his superior capacity. More than once, one of them, a spirited mare, intended for new triumphs at the Louisville races, swam close in front of him, pausing, as if to say, “Mount, and let us gallop off on dry ground;” deflecting his course, which was already beset with abnormal difficulties. For when almost exhausted, he saw that the land he was approaching, half veiled with the gray fog, was a bluff bank, thirty feet high at least, and as far as eye could reach up and down the river there was no lower ground. To scale it was impossible. His heart sank within him. He felt that his stroke was the feebler when hope no longer nerved it. In his despair he could hardly make another effort. And although he had feared the horses, with their lashing hoofs and their unearthly cries, when the mare--the more importunate in dumb insistence that he would succor them--threw up her head, and with a wild inarticulate scream went struggling down into the depths to rise no more, he felt a choking sob in his throat, his eyes were blurred, he could scarcely keep his head above the surface. If he were further conscious, the faculty was not coupled with that of memory, for he never knew how he came to be in a flatboat floating swiftly down the stream from the scene of the disaster, and he never saw his other comrade again. Once more there came an interval void of perception; then he was vaguely aware that the flatboat was tied up in the bight of a bend; the shadowy cypresses towered above it,--he heard their waving boughs,--the water lapped gently about it; then blankness again, and he never knew how long this continued.