Neither could she dislodge the left one.
With her very first struggle she sank above her knees in the spongy sands that still hissed as they sucked in water far down beneath the treacherous surface.
“Help! Help! Oh-h, help! I’m—sinking!”
Her cry in its ghastly terror appealed to the sand-hills before her, to everything in heaven and on earth, as it rose shrilly above the roar of the surf on the Neck of the breakers upon the bar.
CHAPTER XV
IN THE QUICKSANDS’ GRIP
“That was a girl’s cry, Stack!” Kenjo Red—Kenjo the youthful signal-man of the blazing broom performance—lifted his red head that flamed like a beacon amid the wet drabness of the dunes and stopped digging with a small shovel in the side of a sand-mound. “A—a girl’s cry!” he repeated, startled.
“By George! it was. Somewhere the lace is screaming for help! A woman—or a girl—must be drowning or sinking—somewhere!” Miles Stackpole jumped to his feet as he spoke, a ludicrously sanded figure; he had almost tunneled right through one sand-hill in a fevered search for the buried treasure which, according to local tradition, had been hidden by some hardy pirate of old among these wild sand-dunes.
The mumbled tale of the aged hunter after one-legged hen-clams to the effect that, about a quarter of a century prior to this squally day, certain gold and silver coins, a handful of them, stamped like no coinage ever current in the United States, had been picked up on, or near, this very spot, had infected Stack with the gold-fever, with a get-rich-quick delirium that showed in his strained eyes as he held his breath for a moment, trying to decide from what quarter came that feminine cry.
Farther off a third figure stood at attention, too, listening with deep snorts, gulping breaths, like those of a woodland moose whose long ear is trained to catch a faint sound on the wind.