Page:The Father Confessor, Stories of Danger and Death.djvu/45

Rh from the danger on the other bridge near which the woman stood despising him.

"He turned his horse and drove it into the water in the direction of that white face. The swift current nearly took it off its feet. It turned in its terror and ran, uncontrollable, towards its home. As the horse raced the flood for a time, the two human beings gazed at one another, the one powerless to help the other out in the darkness. ‘Help! help! help!’ How the horse’s feet re-echoed that cry long after the drowned lips had gone underneath.

"The man swayed in his saddle. Between the light of the fading day and the rising moon he saw plainly, as he came nearer home, the dark bridge with the great gap in the middle of it, and across the gap, fine as a spider-thread, the wire.

"The swaying wire—but what was on it? Something small and black, like a spider, was creeping across. When he got nearer he saw that it was a man. There was someone braver than himself, then? Well, she had got a hero at last. He drew nearer and watched. He saw the man crawl along, stopping