“Humph! Glad he did!” came from Sara, mouthpiece for the unavenging girls. “He must be a tenderfoot sportsman, though.”
“Not necessarily. A blubbery seal is about the quickest thing on earth; it can dive between the flash of the gun and the time the shot strikes the water--where it has been. Well:
“‘What is missed is mysteries,
What is hits is histories!’”
The old sea-dog chuckled again.
“It certainly is a mystery to me where I’ve seen him before--before to-day!” Sara’s brows were puckered. “His face, as a whole, isn’t exactly, so to speak, familiar. But the eyes are! He blinked as he passed--a cool sort o’ blink--and one of them closed just a shade faster than the other. Oh, bother! ’twill haunt me now.”
It did haunt her, that uneven blink--dogged her back to camp from the sand-bar.
She was still puzzling over it when, late that evening, after darkness fell, she stole down from the big brooding bungalow to the tide’s edge, to say good-night to her harlequin dory, hauled up into the black pocket of a little sandy cove.
Sands and superstition go together. Suddenly Sara found herself shaking from head to foot in the dim, weird light of a clouded moon, with the full tide wailing like a bad ghost below her.
Somebody--somebody besides herself--had been at work upon her dory, that precious legacy!