Silently Hera watched the man at his task, struck by the calmness with which he performed it. By neither look nor word did he betray to her that fear had any place in his emotions. Swifter the river tossed them onward. Louder their crazy vessel creaked and groaned. But his mastery of himself, his superiority to the terrors that bounded them, his disdain for the hazard of events while he did the needful work of the moment, awoke in her a feeling akin to security. It was as if he lifted her with him above the danger in which the maddest whim of fortune had made them partners. “Do you see any way out of it?” she asked, presently, following his example of coolness. He seemed not to hear her voice. With feet set sure and a steady grip on the bridle, he peered into the distance ahead--far over the expanse of violent water, now tinted here and there with rose, caught from the glowing west, where the sun hung low over dark, wooded hills. She wondered what it was that he sought so eagerly, but did not ask. She guessed it had to do with some quickly conceived design for breaking their captivity, and when at length he turned to her she saw in his eye the light of a discovered hope. “Yes,” he said, “we have a good chance. The current bears us toward the point at the bend of the river. We must pass within a few yards of that if I judge rightly.” “And then?” “I shall make use of that,” he answered, pointing to a coil of rope that hung on his saddle-bow. “What I mean to do is----” The sound of breaking planks signalled a danger with which he had not reckoned. He saw one of the end pontoons wrench itself free. Hera saw it too, as it bore away to drift alone; and they knew it for a warning grimly clear that all the members of their uncertain bark must part company ere long. In the silence that fell between them she looked toward the Viadetta bank, where peasants awoke the echoes with their hue and cry. He kept his gaze on the spear of land that marked the river’s sharpest turn. Once or twice he measured with his eye the lessening distance between them and the shore. “We hold to the right course,” he said, confidently. “There will be time.” Piece by piece Hera saw the thing that bore them scatter its parts over the river. “What shall we do?” she asked, a shudder of fear mingling strangely with trust in him. At first he made her no answer, but continued to watch the shore as if striving to discern some signal. Another pontoon broke loose, carrying off a part of the deck and leaving the rest of the planks it had supported hanging in the water. The sound of the breaking timbers did not make him turn his head. When at last he faced her it was to speak in tones all at odds with their desperate state. “See the Old Sentinel!” he exclaimed, gleefully. “He shall save us!”