at was cut off from it by a wavy line of vivid
whiteness, which he knew to be a fringe of spouting surf. It had cost
Wyllard more than he cared to contemplate to reach that beach, and now
there was nothing in the dreary spectacle that could excite any feeling,
except a shrinking from the physical effort of the search. There was
little light in the heavy sky or on the sullen heave of sea; the air was
raw, the schooner's decks were sloppy, and the vessel rolled viciously
as she crept shorewards with her mainsail peak eased down. What wind
there was blew dead on-shore, which was not as the skipper would have
had it.

Wyllard heard the splash of the lead as he and the white man, Charly,
ate their breakfast in the little stern cabin. There was a clatter of
blocks, and on going out on deck he found the men swinging a boat over.
With Charly and two of the Indians he dropped into the boat, and
Dampier, who had hove the schooner to, looked down on them over the
vessel's rail.

"If you knock the bottom out of her put a jacket on an oar, and I'll try
to bring you off," he said, pointing toward the boat. "If you don't
signal I'll stand off and on with a thimble-headed topsail over the
mainsail. You'll start back right away if you see us haul it down. When
she won't stand that there'll be more surf than you'll have any use for
with the wind dead on the beach."

Wyllard made a sign of comprehension, and they slid away on the back of
a long sea. Waves rolled up behind them, cutting off the schooner's hull
so that only her gray canvas showed above dim slopes of water. The beach
rose fast before them. It looked forbidding with the spray-haze drifting
over it, and the long wash of the Pacific weltering among its hammered
stones. When the men drew a little nearer Wyllard stood up with the big
sculling oar in his hand. There was no point to offer shelter, and in
only one place could he see a strip of surf-lapped sand.

"It's a little softer than the boulders, anyway; we'll try it there," he
ordered.

The oars dipped again, and in another minute the sea that came up behind
them hove them high and broke into a little spout of foam. The next wave
had a hissing crest, part of which splashed on board, and, like a
toboggan down an icy slide, the boat went shoreward on the shoulders of
the third. To keep her straight while the water seethed about them was
all that they could do. For a moment their hearts were in their mouths
when the wave l