Heigh-o—Heigh-o."
The scream that Daphne gave now scared even Lost Man out of his 119 next line.
"Oh, I've thought of something perfectly wonderful!" she cried, and speeding into her tent returned with a large shining mirror clasped close in her arms. "Oh, you thought I was silly to bring it!" she admonished her father, "but maybe I wasn't so silly, after all! Maybe I'm going to work a miracle with it! Maybe this is the psychological moment!" Still with the mirrored surface gleaming from her like a bright breastplate she advanced slowly toward Lost Man till every inch of the quicksilver had taken its merciless toll of the scarecrow figure before it. "Now, Lost Man!" she triumphed, "look close! Look close! . . . Who are you?"
As indifferently as an animal Lost Man gazed into the mirror for an instant. Then, quite suddenly, with his neck yanked oddly forward, he stared direct into the reflection and staggered to his feet. Dumb with some inexplicable emotion he stood staring for a breathless moment from Jaffrey Bretton's utterly expressionless face to Daphne's excited eyes. Then, very 120 deliberately the tip of his tongue crept out to moisten his sun- parched lips.
"Do I look like that?" he pointed.
"Yes, I'm afraid you do," admitted Daphne in all honesty.
With a gasp like the gasp of a person strangling, Lost Man raised his arms to heaven. "My God! My God!" he cried, "I thought I was young!" And swinging sharply around he ran madly down the white beach into the white surf and out through the white surf into the blue churn and chop beyond, as though the horizon line itself was his ultimate goal. Outward through the indigo depths in long, slow, fiercely powerful strokes, floundering half erect through azure-colored shoals, merging for interminable seconds with the wild eddy and roar of far outlying breakers, silhouetted for one brief fantastic moment standing ankle-deep on the crest of a hidden sand bar with white gulls circling in a living halo around his head he passed, half whipperee, half miracle-man—into the unfathomable glare.
"Oh, Old-Dad!" gasped Daphne, "won't he be drowned?"
More shaken than he liked to show, Jaffrey Bretton stooped for 121 an instant to brush a tickle of imaginary sand from his instep.
"Not in a thousand years," he said, "but at least he will be— washed."