chman" it was not in me to stand meekly by.

I know that when it was over, and we parted sulky and bruised each his
own way, I flung myself on my face at the edge of the cliff and wished I
had never been born.

How long I lay I know not.

When I looked up the day was dark with tempest. The whistle of the wind
about my ears mingled with the hoarse thunder of the surf as it broke on
the beach, four hundred feet below me, and swept round the point into
the lough. The taste of brine was on my lips, and now and again flakes
of foam whirled past me far inland. From Dunaff to Malin the coast was
one long waste of white water. And already the great Atlantic rollers,
which for a day past had brought their solemn warning in from the open,
were breaking miles out at sea, and racing in on the shore like things
pursued.

As for me, my spirits rose as I looked out and saw it all. For I loved
the sea in its angry moods. And this promise of tempest seemed somehow
to accord with the storm that was raging in my own breast. It made me
forget Tim and the sheep, and even mother.

I tried to get up on my feet, but the wind buffeted me back before I
reached my knees, and I was fain to lie prone, with my nose to the
storm, blinking through half-closed eyes out to sea.

For a long time I lay thus. Then I seemed to descry at the point of the
bay windward a sail. It was a minute or more before I could be certain
I saw aright. Yes, it was a sail.

What craft could be mad enough in such weather to trust itself to the
mercies of the bay? Even my father, the most daring of helmsmen, would
give Fanad Head a wide berth before he put such a wind as this at his
back. This stranger must be either disabled or ignorant of the coast,
or she would never drive in thus towards a lee-shore like ours. Boy as
I was, I knew better seamanship than that.

Yet as I watched her, she seemed to me neither cripple nor fool. She
was a cutter-rigged craft, long and low in the water, under close
canvas, and to my thinking wonderfully light and handy in the heavy sea.
She did not belong to these parts--even I could tell that--and her
colours, if she had any, had gone with the wind.

The question was, would she on her present tack weather Fanad Head (on
which I lay) and win the lough? And if not, how could she escape the
rocks on which every moment she was closing?

At first it seemed that nothing could save her, for she broke off short
of the point,