overfalling in a mile-long sweep and
thundering into white ruin of foam on a crescent beach of sand scarcely
less white.

How long they stood and watched the stately procession of breakers,
rising from out the deep and wind-capped sea to froth and thunder at
their feet, Saxon did not know. She was recalled to herself when Billy,
laughing, tried to remove the telescope basket from her shoulders.

"You kind of look as though you was goin' to stop a while," he said. "So
we might as well get comfortable."

"I never dreamed it, I never dreamed it," she repeated, with
passionately clasped hands. "I... I thought the surf at the Cliff House
was wonderful, but it gave no idea of this.--Oh! Look! LOOK! Did you
ever see such an unspeakable color? And the sunlight flashing right
through it! Oh! Oh! Oh!"

At last she was able to take her eyes from the surf and gaze at the
sea-horizon of deepest peacock-blue and piled with cloud-masses, at the
curve of the beach south to the jagged point of rocks, and at the rugged
blue mountains seen across soft low hills, landward, up Carmel Valley.

"Might as well sit down an' take it easy," Billy indulged her. "This is
too good to want to run away from all at once."

Saxon assented, but began immediately to unlace her shoes.

"You ain't a-goin' to?" Billy asked in surprised delight, then began
unlacing his own.

But before they were ready to run barefooted on the perilous fringe
of cream-wet sand where land and ocean met, a new and wonderful thing
attracted their attention. Down from the dark pines and across the
sandhills ran a man, naked save for narrow trunks. He was smooth and
rosy-skinned, cherubic-faced, with a thatch of curly yellow hair, but
his body was hugely thewed as a Hercules'.

"Gee!--must be Sandow," Billy muttered low to Saxon.

But she was thinking of the engraving in her mother's scrapbook and of
the Vikings on the wet sands of England.

The runner passed them a dozen feet away, crossed the wet sand, never
parsing, till the froth wash was to his knees while above him, ten feet
at least, upreared a was of overtopping water. Huge and powerful as
his body had seemed, it was now white and fragile in the face of that
imminent, great-handed buffet of the sea. Saxon gasped with anxiety, and
she stole a look at Billy to note that he was tense with watching.

But the stranger sprang to meet the blow, and, just when it seemed he
must be crushed, he dived into the face of t