und himself filling his lungs with free air and fighting his way
toward the cabin doors through water waist-deep. Then he had won to
them, had found and was tearing frantically at the solid brass bolt that
held them shut. In another breath he had torn them open, wide,
discovering the woman, her head and shoulders showing above the flood as
she stood upon a transom, near the doorway, grasping a stanchion for
support. Her eyes met his, black and blank with terror. He snatched
through sheer instinct at a circular life-preserver that floated out
toward him, and simultaneously managed to crook an arm round her neck.

Again the sea buried them beneath tons of raging dark water. Green
lightnings flashed before his eyes, and in his ears there was a crashing
like the crack of doom. His head was splitting, his heart on the point
of breaking. The wave passed on, roaring. He could breathe. Now if
ever....

As if stupefied beyond sensibility, the woman was passive to his
handling. If she had struggled, if she had caught at and clung to him,
or even if she had tried to help herself, he would in all likelihood
have failed to cheat destruction. But she did none of these things, and
he managed somehow to drag her from the cabin to the cockpit and to jam
the life ring over her head and under one arm before the next wave bore
down upon them.

As the wall of living green water drew near, he twisted one hand into
the life-line of the cork ring and lifted the woman to the seat of the
cockpit.

They were borne down, brutally buffeted, smothered and swept away. They
came to the surface in the hollow of a deep, gray swale, fully fifty
feet from the wreck. Whitaker retained his grasp of the life-preserver
line. The woman floated easily in the support. He fancied a gleam of
livelier consciousness in her staring eyes, and noticed with a curiously
keen feeling of satisfaction that she was not only keeping her mouth
closed, but had done so, apparently, while under water.

Relieved from danger of further submersion, at all events for the time
being, he took occasion to rally his wits and look about him as well as
he was able. It was easy, now, to understand how the kidnappers had come
to their disaster; at this distance he could see plainly, despite the
scudding haze, the profile of a high bluff of wave-channelled and bitten
earth rising from a boulder-strewn beach, upon which the surf broke with
a roar deafening and affrighting. Even a hardy sw