T. C. had once seen a whale’s skeleton in a museum, set up and articulated. Her vivid imagination had pictured a beach covered with whale skeletons just like that, and, instead of thanking providence for the absence of such a bone-yard, her mind grumbled. She was wearing one of Bud’s superfluous panamas and she took it off and put it on again.
As they landed close to the pulpit rock Hank said nothing, George said nothing, Candon, visibly disturbed, looked north and south. Here but a short time ago had been ribs lying about like great bent staves, skulls, vertebræ. Here to-day there was nothing but sand.
He did not know that a fortnight ago a south wind had “moved the beach,” bringing up hundreds of thousands of tons of sand not only from the south end but from the bay beyond; that in a month more, maybe, a north wind would move the beach, sending the sand back home; that only between the winds the bones were laid fully bare. No storm was required to do the work, just a steady driving wind sifting, sifting, sifting for days and days.
The fact that the beach seemed higher just here suddenly brought the truth to Candon.
“Boys,” said he, “it’s the sand.”
No one spoke for a moment under the frost that had fallen on them. Then Hank said, “Sure you’ve struck the right bay?”
Like Tommie, he had pictured entire skeletons, not bones and skulls lying flat and easily sanded over.
“Sure. It’s the sand has lifted over them.”
Scarcely had he spoken when a thunderbolt fell into the shallows a cable length away from the shore. It was the eagle. In a moment it rose, a fish in its talons, and went climbing the air to seaward, and then up a vast spiral stairs in the blue, and then, like an arrow, away to the far-off hills.
It was like an underscore to the desolation of this place, where man was disregarded if not unknown.