“If you knock the bottom out of her put a jacket on an oar, and I’ll try to bring you off,” he said, pointing toward the boat. “If you don’t signal I’ll stand off and on with a thimble-headed topsail over the mainsail. You’ll start back right away if you see us haul it down. When she won’t stand that there’ll be more surf than you’ll have any use for with the wind dead on the beach.”
Wyllard made a sign of comprehension, and they slid away on the back of a long sea. Waves rolled up behind them, cutting off the schooner’s hull so that only her gray canvas showed above dim slopes of water. The beach rose fast before them. It looked forbidding with the spray-haze drifting over it, and the long wash of the Pacific weltering among its hammered stones. When the men drew a little nearer Wyllard stood up with the big sculling oar in his hand. There was no point to offer shelter, and in only one place could he see a strip of surf-lapped sand.
“It’s a little softer than the boulders, anyway; we’ll try it there,” he ordered.
The oars dipped again, and in another minute the sea that came up behind them hove them high and broke into a little spout of foam. The next wave had a hissing crest, part of which splashed on board, and, like a toboggan down an icy slide, the boat went shoreward on the shoulders of the third. To keep her straight while the water seethed about them was all that they could do. For a moment their hearts were in their mouths when the wave left them to sink with a dizzy swing into the hollow of the sea.
They pulled desperately as another white-topped ridge came on astern, and they went up with it amid a chaotic frothing and splashing of spray. After that there was a shock and a crash. They sprang out into the knee-deep water and held fast to the boat while the foam boiled into her. Before the next sea came in they had run the boat up beyond its reach, and they discovered that there was not much the matter with her when they hove her over. Wyllard looked back at the tumbling surf.
“Dampier was right about that topsail; it won’t be quite so easy getting off,” he declared. “You’ll stand by, Charly, and watch the schooner. If the surf gets steeper you can make some sign. I’ll leave one of the Siwash on the rise yonder.”
Then he walked up the beach. On the crest of the low rise a mile or two behind it, he stopped a while, gazing out at what seemed to be an empty desolation. There were willows in the hollow beneath him, and upon the slope a few little stunted trees, which resembled the juniper that he had seen among the ranges of British Columbia, but he could see no sign of any kind of life. What was more portentous, the mossy sod he stood upon was frozen, and there were stretches of snow among the straggling firs upon a higher ridge. Inland, the little breeze seemed to have fallen dead away, and there was an oppressive silence which the rumble of the surf accentuated.
Wyllard left one of the Indians on the hill and going on with the other scrambled through a half-frozen swamp in the hollow; but when they came back hours afterwards as the narrow horizon was drawing further in, they had found nothing to show that any man had ever entered that grim, silent land. The surf seemed a little smoother, and they reeled out through it with only a few inches of very cold water splashing about their boots, and pulled across a long stretch of darkening sea toward the rolling schooner.
Wyllard was weary and depressed, but it was not until he sat in the stern cabin with its cheerful twinkling stove and swinging lamp that he understood how he had shrunk from that forbidding wilderness. His consultation with Dampier, who came in by and by, was brief.
“We’ll head north for a couple of days, and try again,” he said.