e waves.

As they hurried down to the point off the bluff to command a wider view
of the waters, the wind whipped their skirts about them and tore at
their hair.

Three grey gulls flew swiftly overhead with plaintive, long-drawn cries
quite different from their usual raucous screams. In her anxiety Ellen
remembered that these wild birds of Kon Klayu had as many moods as the
sea, and were prophetic of them. Loll, holding tightly to his mother's
hand, looked up at her with grave eyes.

"Mother," he said, "Senott told me one time that sea-gulls are the
souls of little dead Indian babies and they always cry for their
mothers before a storm. Hear them now?"

Immeasurably sad and longing the bird call struck through the sound of
increasing surf. Above, the whole sky was a mass of swiftly moving
clouds. The wind increased steadily.

Another dragging hour went by with no sign of the whale-boat. With the
incoming tide the wind had risen until Ellen's heart quaked with a
great fear for the men who must row against it. Her senses tingled
with the welter of torn, tempestuous sea and clouds that seemed to
mingle and snatch at her with stinging, salt fingers. Her straining
eyes smarted from the high-flung spray of increasing combers.

Bracing against the gale, she suddenly found herself aching from the
stress of trying, by sheer will, to keep back the force of the storm.
Some pagan thing within her had endowed the elements with a godlike
personality. She caught herself praying, beseeching the sea to rise no
higher; to be kind to her loved ones tossing somewhere on its seething
bosom. Both wind and tide were against the whale-boat now, and looking
out across the rearing waters it seemed to her that no small craft
could live in such a sea.

A few drops of rain stung her face. Afar off from the southwest more
was coming. . . . She turned hopelessly from it, then almost at once
her dull misery was changed to joy.

Half a mile out a blurred, dark thing rose for an instant on the crest
of a billow. She started to point it out to Jean, but simultaneously
the rain-squall struck her, drenching, stinging, cutting off for a
moment her view of the sea. From under the grey curtain of the driving
rain combers of muddy green raced in, spouting high in wind-torn fury
against the rocks and rolling swiftly toward her to fling themselves
roaring at her. . . . Again in a lull she caught a glimpse of the boat
tossing skyward . .