What was safe for him would, therefore, in all likelihood be safe for me.
With this hope to comfort me I prepared to enter.

My first care was the jewels, so, feeling them precarious in my shirt, I twined the collar round my neck and clasped it.

The snake-clasp was no flimsy device of modern jewellery, and I had no fear but that it would hold.
I held the pistol between my teeth, and with a prayer to God slipped into the muddy waters.
I swam in the wild way of a beginner who fears cramp.

The current was light and the water moderately warm, but I seemed to go very slowly, and I was cold with apprehension.

In the middle it suddenly shallowed, and my breast came against a mudshoal.