"Oh, get on! For Heaven's sake, get on!" he wanted to shout, but almost to his astonishment pride of race kept him grimly silent. He had never felt before the whole debt that is owing to a white skin.
The headman in the stern-sheets sculled now and again with his oar to keep the boat head on to the roll, and between whiles chattered nervously. The Krooboy paddlers on the gunwales rested on their paddles and scratched themselves. Roller after roller went by, flinging the boat up towards heaven, sucking her back again to the sea grass below, with a rocking motion that was horrible beyond belief. Carter felt the color ebb from his cheeks; he wondered with a grisly humor if his head was paling also.
But at last the headman delivered himself of a shriek, and a galvanic activity seized the paddlers. They stabbed the water with their trident-shaped blades, and stabbed and stabbed again. The surf-boat was poised on the crest of a great mound of water, and they were straining every sinew to keep her there. But the water motion travelled more swiftly than the clumsy boat. She slid down the slope, still paddling frantically, and the following wave lifted her rudely by the tail. She reared dizzily almost to the vertical, the headman at the apex of the whole structure keeping his perch with an ape's dexterity.
She just missed being upset that time, and part of the water which she had shipped was flung over the gunwales as she righted. But she floated there half swamped: labor with what frenzy they choose, the iron-muscled Krooboys could not keep her under command; and the next roller sent the whole company of them flying.
There is one piece of advice constantly dinned into a white man's ear on the West Coast. "If in a surf-boat you see the boat boys jump overboard, jump yourself also if you do not wish to have the boat on top of you." Profoundly sound advice it is. But it has the disadvantage of presupposing capability for obedience, and if (as frequently happens) the passenger is dizzy and weak from sudden seasickness, then the leap may be neither prompt nor well-aimed.
As to where Carter's fault occurred, I have no certain information. The headman shrieked an order in his own barbarous tongue; the boat boys took to water on either side like so many black frogs; the boat spilt, flinging far two yellow gladstone bags and one limp passenger in soiled white ducks; and, look how one would into that boiling hell of broken water, no red head appeared.
On the glaring beach Swizzle-Stick Smith broke off from his overseeing for a moment, and limped down into the smoke of the surf. He had a chiquot in his hand, which is a whip made of the most stinging part of the hippopotamus, and with it he slashed venomously at every black form that scrambled out of the brine.
He screamed at them in their own tongue. "Get back, you black swine! Get back, and fetch out my clerk. If you drown my clerk, I will drown you, too. My last clerk died a year ago, and they have got me no other out here since. I won't lose this one. Back, you bushmen!"
The chiquot had many terrors to the Krooboys, the water few. It was as much out of forgetfulness as anything else that they had not brought their passenger to shore with them. Besides, how were they to know that he could not swim as well as themselves (that is, about as well as a seal can swim)? But they were not above striking a bargain for their services. A black head, served upon a white pother of creamy surf, gave tongue.
"Oh, Smith. You give cash, suppose we fit for catch 'im?"