“Oh, I’ll be swept down—down—among the breakers on the bar!” The girl’s fingers interlocked convulsively as she cowered upon the middle thwart-seat of the boat, her eyes blindfolded by spray, her face working, discolored by fear, her wet knees groveling at the swollen roar of those breakers, heard even when they were farther off and invisible, among the crystalline sand-mounds of the Sugarloaf.
They crisped and curled and reared themselves through transparent sheets of rain like a pale wall between her and another world. Beyond them, even if by a miracle she should be swept past and through them alive, was the foamy vastness of the open sea where such frail things as a girl and a dory must surely be swallowed up in the tumult and tumble.
“Oh! I can’t be drowned. I can’t be drowned.” Frightened to a frenzy, her bent knees stiffened, she made a movement to stand up in the wildly rocking boat, to shout, scream, shriek for help to one shore, or both—shriek her loudest against the roar of wind, rain and spray.
The fatal impulse almost overcame her. She was stumbling, staggering to her feet, when like a wave from nowhere, flooding her agonized consciousness, came a memory of Captain Andy’s instructions to her and her Camp Fire Sisters, how to act if ever, by any most unlikely chance, they should be caught in such a peril.
“Lie flat,” he said. “Flat as a flounder! Slip down under the thwart-seats, make yourself one with the dory’s bottom. In such a ‘fearsome fix’ a girl who couldn’t keep a grip of herself would stand up and holler! A Camp Fire Girl, with presence of mind, would know enough to lie flat!”
Trembling, this Camp Fire Girl sank back upon the shaking thwart. She closed her eyelids tight, the bursting tears mingling with the spray behind them. And the roar of the breakers was lost in the voice of prayer crying passionately in her own young heart.
As on one July day, nearly two months before, she had prayed desperately for physical strength to carry the dripping, bowing weight of a deaf-and-dumb child out of a playground pool, so now she prayed for soul-strength to carry her torch of presence of mind through these swirling, drowning waters—for self-grip!
And self-control came to her.
Down she slipped, down, until her shuddering body pressed the boat’s bottom, until she lay on her back, flattened out under the dripping, shiny cross-seats.
And with the obedient action came a gleam of hope, like a play of lightning through the rain, for Captain Andy had given a reason for his advice: that the dory being flat-bottomed the waves by themselves would never capsize her; neither was it likely that she would ship enough water even among the breakers to swamp her; that a girl in her—even though carried out to sea—would stand a fair chance, if she could only “hold on to herself,” of being picked up when the squall was over.