From the bow spurted a white puff of smoke.

The dull report of a musket lagged across the water.
The bullet skipped like a schoolboy's pebble, ripping out little rags of white along that surface of liquid clay.
The line of fire thus revealed, revealed the mark.

Untouched, a black head bobbed vigorously in the water, some few yards before the boat.

The saffron crew, poling faster, yelled and cackled at so clean a miss, while a coolie in the bow reloaded his matchlock.
The fugitive head labored like that of a man not used to swimming, and desperately spent.

It now gave a quick twist, and showed a distorted face, almost of the same color with the water.
The mouth gaped black in a sputtering cry, then closed choking, squirted out water, and gaped once more, to wail clearly:-- "I am Jesus Christ!" In the broad, bare daylight of the river, this lonely and sudden blasphemy came as though a person in a dream might declare himself to a waking audience of skeptics.