lad.

Noll read an answer in his eyes, and hastened to the door, and bounded
away without waiting for any more words or explanations.

How fast it had grown dark while he was in Dirk's hut! The horizon was
quite hidden, so was all the wide waste a half-mile from shore; but
with the coming of night the sea had lost none of its thunder, nor
the wind aught of its fierceness. Noll ran till he was out of breath.
Then he walked, thinking that the homeward path was wonderfully long.
Then he ran again, feeling almost as if the child's life depended upon
his exertions, and seeming to hear its wail above all the din of wind
and waves.

Suddenly he plashed to his ankles, and this brought his headlong race
to an abrupt termination. What could it mean? Then he remembered, with
a sudden chill, what, in his eagerness and anxiety, he had entirely
forgotten,--the tide was coming in, and was already over the path
which Uncle Richard warned him against.

He looked back. The beach over which he had come glimmered faintly in
the dusk, with its long line of breakers gleaming far up and down.
Back there in the darkness, he thought, Dirk's child was dying for
want of medicine. Oh! what to do? He looked down at the foam creeping
about his ankles, and said to himself,--

"Pshaw! it's only over shoe, now, and my feet are wet already. I'll
dash through; 'twon't take but three minutes, and I _can't_ wait!"

He sprang on, thinking to clear the short strip, which the tide had
covered, with a few bounds. A wave, high and broad, which had been
gathering power and volume in all its long, onward course, came
sweeping thunderingly in and engulfed him.

CHAPTER X.

IN THE SEA.

Noll's presence of mind enabled him to clutch the jagged sides of the
rock desperately, so that in the wave's return he was not drawn with
it into the sea depths. Stunned, strangled, half blinded, and impelled
by a sudden horror of death in the cold, treacherous sea, he took two
or three forward steps, fell, then rose and strove to struggle on.
But a little hollow in the path let him down into the flood to his
waist. The spray flew into his eyes and mouth, and breathless and
bewildered he fell again, this time to disappear under the
foam-flecked water. He struggled up to air and life at last, with many
gasps for breath, and once more clutched at the rocks behind him. It
all seemed like the terror of a dream, not real and threatening. Was
he to be dr