The cry, sharp with forlorn hope, rang like
an appeal.
"Why--look," stammered Heywood. "He sees us--heading here. Look,
it's--Quick! let me out!"
Just as he turned to elbow through his companions, and just as the cry
sounded again, the matchlock blazed from the bow. No bullet skipped. The
swimmer, who had reached the shallows, suddenly rose with an incredible
heave, like a leaping salmon, flung one bent arm up and back in the
gesture of the Laocooen, and pitched forward with a turbid splash. The
quivering darkness under the banyan blotted everything: death had
dispersed the black minnows there, in oozy wriggles of shadow; but next
moment the fish-tail stripes chased in a more lively shoal. The gleaming
potter, below his rosy cairn, stared. The mourners forgot their grief.
Heywood, after his impulse of rescue, stood very quiet.
"You saw," he repeated dully. "You all saw."
The clutching figure, bolt upright in the soaked remnant of prison
rags, had in that leap and fall shown himself for Chok Chung, the
Christian. He had sunk in mystery, to become at one forever with the
drunken cormorant-fisher.
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