Prisoners of Chance

Every occurrence impressed me that night as unusual. Perchance this was because both heart and head were sadly out of tune. Yet, at best, it was a lonesome journey, and remains a grewsome memory, haunting with many a spectre, as weird as the shadows of delirium. The few stars, peeping shyly forth between scurrying black cloud masses, were so far away they merely silvered the cloud edges, leaving them as though carven from granite. The low shore, often within reach of our oar blades, appeared gloomy and inhospitable, the spectral rushes creeping far out upon the water like living things, seeming to grasp after us as the wind swept them, and we glided past in phantom silence. Beyond, like a great black wall, arose higher ground, occasionally jutting into bare bluffs outlined against the lighter sky; again diversified by gaunt dead trees, their fleshless limbs extended upward toward ghostly pillars of vapor ever floating from off the river's surface. Occasionally, jaggedly uneven, close-set trunks of forest growth would appear, spectral in solemn ugliness, a veritable hedge, impenetrable and grim.

If, with a shudder of disgust, I turned away from that lorn, dead line of shore, my eyes swept a waste of waters slipping solemnly past, while farther out, where sky and stream met and mingled in wild riot, the surging river swirled and leaped, its white-capped waves evidencing resistless volume. It was a sight to awe one, that immense mass pouring forth from the upper darkness, flashing an instant beneath the star-gleam, only to disappear, a restless, relentless flood, black, unpitying, impenetrable, mysterious, a savage monster, beyond whose outstretched claws we crept, yet who at any moment might clutch us helpless in a horrible embrace. It was a sight to stun, that brutal flood, gliding ever downward, while, far as eye could see, stretched the same drear expanse of cruel waters.

From out that mystery would suddenly emerge, rolling toward us, as if born of the shadows, some grim apparition, a wildly tossing figure, with gaunt, uplifted arms beating the air, to startle for an instant, then fade from our ken into the dimness below. Well I knew it was only driftwood, the gnarled trunk of uprooted tree made sport with by mad waves, yet more than once I shrank backward, my unstrung nerves tingling, as such shapeless, uncanny thing was hurled past like an arrow. Nor were the noises that broke the silence less fearsome. Bred to the wilderness, I little minded loneliness when in the depths of the backwoods, but this was different. I cared nothing for the honk of wild fowl overhead, nor those sounds of varied animal life borne to us from off the black land; but that strange, dull roar, caused by great logs grinding together in the swirl of the current, and the groaning of bits of undermined shore as they gave way and dropped heavily into the water, racked my nerves.