"Mary, Mary, find her, go along!" cried Katherine; then with a short bark Hero turned to the track leading seawards, and set off at a trot, looking neither to the right hand nor to the left.
Katherine groaned. The tideholes nearest the sea naturally filled first, and it could not be very far from high tide already. Looking back, she saw Oily Dave gaining upon her, and waved to him again to make haste. It was of no use to shout, because the wind was blowing from him to her, and so her voice would not carry. Then a dash of cold rain struck her from behind, and thankful she was that it was behind, for if it had struck her in the face she could hardly have stood against it. Right in front of her Hero was trotting forward with head carried well in the air, and an eager alertness in every limb. It was clear the creature felt no uncertainty about its movements, and the feeling that she was going right was an unspeakable comfort to Katherine, who toiled along in the rear.
Suddenly the dog stopped dead short, flung up its head with a weird, dismal howl, then bounded forward at a headlong pace.
What had it heard?
Katherine tried to run too, but the track was uphill now, and the force of the wind caught her the higher she got. Panting, breathless, her heart beating with fierce, irregular thumps, she toiled up the rocky track, and, crossing the summit, began to descend on the other side.
The gulch was before her now. When she had seen it last it was a rocky valley, deep in the cliffs, and floored with boulders. Now it was a long pool, for the tide was in, and the sea, working through the porous, frost-riven rocks, had half-filled it with water. Katherine, approaching the gulch from the landward side, was coming to the place from an opposite direction to that by which Jervis Ferrars had reached it, and her path downwards was much easier than his had been.
She was hesitating whether it was of any use to go in, thinking the dog must have led her wrong after all, when she caught sight of something bobbing up and down in the water—something that looked like a man's head, and at which Hero was barking furiously.
She ran then with flying, reckless feet, jumping from boulder to boulder, slipping and sliding, but, as she said afterwards, going too fast to fall. The person in the water had put up a wet hand, crying hoarsely for help, and the leaping, suffocating bound which her heart gave told her that it was Jervis Ferrars who needed her.
"Can you catch the rope if I throw it?" she cried, flinging the coil on the ground so that it might unwind easily.
"Yes," he said in an exhausted tone, which showed her that she had come only just in time.