There was emphatic dissent. The men pleaded with him in shouts, shrieking arguments that the wind tore from their lips and the great thunder of the ocean drowned. These were not circumstances under which he should feel impelled to go aboard; the risk of travel either way was too serious for a single unnecessary journey in the buoy to be undertaken; the line might not have been made fast properly, in which event he would be the first man lost; in the conditions that existed he could do nothing when he got aboard, and he would become merely one more man to be hauled ashore.
These pleas were without avail. Keeper Tom admitted that he “didn’t know what he could do till he got there. The thing,” he added, “is to get there.”
“Dick,” he shouted in Richard Hand’s ear, “in any case, I can’t do much alone. I can’t ask any of my men to risk their lives by coming out on the next trip out of the buoy. I’m not asking you to. But men——”
The racket of the storm made the end of the sentence inaudible. Dick Hand did not need it. He flung his arm about Tom Lupton and bellowed: “I’ll be there. Next trip out.”
Keeper Tom communicated the order to his men. It was not until Tom Lupton was in the buoy and moving over the boiling surf at the foot of the sand dunes that Richard Hand thought, with a shock, of Mary Vanton. Three men in the world were charged, in varying degrees, with some responsibility to stand by her and aid her. One had disappeared and the other two were about to jeopard their lives.
XVIII
He felt he must see Mary for a moment and speak to her. He left the cluster of men on the dune and hurried to the house.
He found her on the rug in the east living room. One or two of the crew were warming their hands and swallowing hot coffee in the other large room. The men came over, not more than two at a time, at intervals, to get thawed out.
“Tom,” he said, “has gone off in the buoy.”
“I know,” she answered. “I saw someone being hauled out and I knew it must be he.”