Laura, suddenly grown calm with that heroic resolution which inspires every true woman in the moment of need, let the boy’s head fall back and mustered her thoughts. She realized the essential thing was go for help, at once. Strong as she was, and nerved with desperation, she knew the task of dragging Hal up the companionway, of getting him into her dory, of carrying him ashore in the gale-beaten surf surpassed her powers.
So she must leave him, even though he should die alone there.
But, first, she could at least give him some aid. She peered about her, flicking the electric beam over the trampled confusion. What could she use for bandages? A smashed suit-case yawned wide, its contents slewed about. She caught up a shirt, tore it into broad strips and, laying the flashlight in the berth, bent to her work.
“Oh, God!” she whispered, as she laid bare the wound; but though she felt giddy, she kept on. The sagging dead weight of Hal’s body almost overbore her strength. She held it up, however, and very tightly bound him, up around the massive neck, over the back, across the high-arched, muscular chest. She knotted her bandages, and let Hal sink down again.
Then she smoothed back his drabbled hair. She bent and kissed him; snatched the light, turned and fled up the companion, clambered down into the dory, and cast loose.
All the strength of her young arms had to strain their uttermost. Passionately she labored. The wounded man no longer was the brute who had so cruelly sought to wrong her. He was no longer the untamed savage, the bully, the thief. No, in his helplessness he had gone swiftly back to the boy she had known and loved—just Hal, her boy.
The storm-devils, snatching at her, seemed incarnate things that fought her for his life. The wind that drove her away from the shingle-beach and toward the rocks below Jim Gordon’s store, the lathering crests that spewed their cold surges into the dory as it heaved high and swung far down, seemed shouting: “Death to Hal!”
Laura, her hair down and flying wild, pulled till wrists and arms seemed breaking. For a few minutes she thought herself lost; but presently, when breath and strength were at the ragged edge, she began to hear the loud, rattling clamor of pebbles on the shingle. A breaker caught the dory, flung it half round, upset it. Into the water, strangling, struggling, Laura plunged. The backwash caught her, tugged at her. She found footing, lost it, fell and choked a cry in cold brine.
The next breaker heaved her up. She crawled through wrack and weed, over jagged stones, and fell exhausted on a sodden windrow of drift.