Jessica leaped to the conclusion on the wings of an amazed and sudden peal of laughter that rocked her in her deep and spongy tracks.
“Who ever, ever heard of boys being so foolish?”
But never was folly so welcome! She had been about to drop warily upon all fours again, so as not to throw all her weight at once upon any treacherous patch of sand that she might come to. Now, she tucked her hair behind her ears and ploughed on boldly upright—no more harm could come to her, with those mirthful voices so near.
She wished she could see the vain diggers. She stared hard at the sand-hill from behind whose wind-scarred, rain-gullied rampart resounded their prospecting shouts.
She thought she must be catching the treasure-seeking contagion herself, or else that her drifting trip down-river to the bar had crazed her; she did actually see, under the glint of the lightening sky, a tiny something that flashed like silver in one of the wet, riven grooves of that sand-hill.
“Pshaw! it’s only a piece of glass or a bright shell,” she thought. “But it shines like a welcoming eye.”
She was eager, poor girlish castaway, to get near to anything that looked bright and welcoming amid the wild solitude around her and more eager still to arrive within easy hail of the infatuated diggers hidden from her by the sandy pyramid thatched with long, rain-wet beach-grass, just beginning to turn yellow.
Fixing her eyes upon the gold-green wave of that grass as it bowed to the careering gusts now lightly skipping out of the east, she unthinkingly set her left foot down in a sandy hollow. That left foot reported that the sand there was firm.
But the right had a different story to tell. As she heavily dragged that right foot out of its last footprint in which it had sunk more than ankle-deep, moved it forward in front of the left and let her weight come on it, there was a swishing, sucking, horrible sound in the sands beneath her.
With all her might she tried to pull the right foot out again—and couldn’t.