But those wheeling strokes were the death-knell of safety, of safety’s last chance.
The now terrified rower saw the pretty, warm head-gear, which she had bought out of the little pocket-money given her from time to time by Cousin Anne, dance upon the wave for a moment—a green blossom upon a white tendril of foam—just beyond her reach.
She did not see its soaked collapse; she lost sight of it, of everything without and within her, except a blinding aching terror, for, all in a moment, the dory and she were whirling at the heart of a water-spout.
The rain let loose by that last fierce gust drenched her sweater and short skirt.
A second gust blowing with equal ferocity offshore, and yet another, turned loose by the descending squall, spun her boat out toward the whirlpool heart of the river where the baby tide, like a lion’s whelp, fought the tiger gusts.
A reeling minute, the spray as well as the rain soaking and blinding her, the wind tearing loose her drenched hair, driving it across her face as if it would steal that, too, and whipping the breath out of her body, while the decorated oars wavered in her wet grasp that desperately tried to hold on to them, slipping between the racked row-locks which shook like chattering teeth!
Then those mad gusts rushed on to continue their fight with the incoming tide nearer to the mouth of the river, dragging the dory in their train, or brother-gusts, following, spun and drove it, really it mattered not which—nothing mattered now—for the fierce, wet onslaught of wind had taken, not a girl’s streaming hair, indeed, but something far more precious at the moment—one of her painted oars.
“Oh! what’s to become of me? I can’t row—I couldn’t, anyway! Will anybody see me from shore? Captain Andy might put off in a boat to save me, but he’s away up the river! The Boy Scouts! Their camp is far over among those other dunes, near the open sea, on the farther side of them!” Wildly Jessica’s gaze swept the pale beach and dunes lining the opposite shore of the river from the Sugarloaf as she drew in her second symbol-painted oar, now helpless, while the wind gnashed at its emblems and the foam hissed Sally’s flame.
Nowhere along the drab, rain-pelted line of beach, sands-pit and tall dune on either side of her was there a sign of a boat putting off—any indication that somebody saw her plight and would make an attempt, at least, to rescue her.
Indeed, along the whole coast of Massachusetts, north and south, no wilder or more lonely spot could be picked out than the mouth of this tidal river, left for nearly two-thirds of the year entirely to the harbor-seals and an occasional sportsman or professional gunner!