Then the budgerow struck a submerged rock with a violence that must have pitched him overboard were he not holding Nejdi's headstall at the moment. She careened so badly that the girls shrieked and Malcolm himself thought she would turn turtle. But she swung clear, righted herself, and lay broadside on to the current. Another crash, less violent but even more disastrous, tore away the rudder and wrenched the spar pulley out of the top of the mast. The heavy sail fell of course, but by some miracle left the occupants of the boat uninjured. And now the maimed craft was carried along sluggishly, drifting back towards the center of the river, while the men in the other boats set up a fiendish yell of delight at the catastrophe that had overtaken the doomed Feringhis. Their skilled boatmen evidently knew of this reef. They stood away towards the shore, but the triumphant jeering that came from the crowded decks showed that they meant to pass their dismantled quarry and wait in safer waters until it lumbered down upon them. Malcolm suddenly became aware of his wounded arm. With a curious fatalism he began to dissect his emotions. He arrived at the conclusion that the drop from the nervous tension of hope to the relaxation of sheer despair had dulled his brain and weakened his physical powers. This, then, was the end. There could be no doubt about it. He quieted the startled horses with a word or two and spoke to the girls again. "You may as well come on deck now," he said. "It is all up with us. If a friendly bullet puts us out of our misery, so much the better. Otherwise my advice to you both is to leap into the river rather than be recaptured." Grace was sobbing hysterically, but Harriet, clasping her fondly in her arms, looked up at him. "No," she said, "we must not do that. Our lives are not our own. The Lord gave and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord!" Frank winced in his anguish. To a puissant man there is nothing so galling as helplessness; what a game of battledore and shuttlecock had been played with him and those bound up with his fortunes since the moulvie's man-trap brought him headlong to the earth in the main street of Rai Bareilly! "Huzoor!" yelled Chumru, excitedly. "Look! There below! A smoke ship! And see! Those sons of pigs are making for the bank!"