The exertion of keeping their charge afloat, and breasting the current
at the same time, carried them a considerable distance downstream, and
they landed perhaps an eighth of a mile below where the main body of
shivering wretches were congregated.
'Do yees feel aisy?' inquired Mickey, when the hunter had been laid
upon the grass, beneath some overhanging bushes.
'Yes, I'll soon git over it but woofh! that thar war a whack of the
biggest kind I got. It has made me powerful weak.'
'What might it have been naow!' inquired Hopkins.
'Can't sayfust thing I know'd, I didn't know nothin'remember suthin'
took me back the head, and the next thing I kerwholloped in the
water.'
The three men had lost everything except what was on their bodies when
the catastrophe occurred. Their horses were gone, and they hadn't a
gun between them; nothing but two revolvers, and about a half dozen
charges for each.
Of the twenty odd who were upon the steamer at the time of the
explosion, nearly one-half were killed; they sinking to the bottom
almost as suddenly as the wrecked steamer, of which not a single trace
now remained.
The survivors made their way to land, reaching it a short distance
below their starting-point, and here they assembled, to commiserate
with each other upon their hapless lot and determine how they were to
reach home.
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