A strange, lithe figure this third in a rough blue shirt that showed a brown, sinewy throat, high cowhide boots that reached to the knee, but were as destitute of heels as a Camp Fire Girl’s moccasins, and a bright red knitted cap fitting down over his head, with a scarlet tassel that flirted with the young gust from the east as he stood on a low sand-hill, alert to catch another cry.
Hardly the interval of three seconds elapsed before it came, quivering with the same horrified, passionate terror as the first.
At its first appealing note Stack started off, dashing up the tunneled sand-hill with long springs—like the wild deer that so often traversed these lonely dunes—and down the sandy pyramid upon the other side, landing, breathless, upon the narrow strip of beach for which Jessica had been making. Thence he had a view of the broad, jutting point called the Neck and of its flanking sandspits, brown areas of sand on which the wild tide was slowly encroaching, and of something sticking up like a dark stump from a sinister patch of sands, not thirty yards off, the sinking figure of a girl in a dark sweater, already nearly buried to the waist.
Without a shade of hesitation Miles Stackpole, Eagle Scout, made a valiant dash for the wetter sands to reach that figure.
The agonized victim saw him coming. In a vague way she recognized him. He had no green and red stripes, no rich points of color, embroidered merit badges, upon his sleeve to-day, no swooping eagle upon his breast. But he was the same tanned, eighteen-year-old lad who had taken the heavy deaf-and-dumb child, swamped by a cargo of green apples, from her dripping arms.
“Keep quiet! Don’t move!” he screamed to her. “More you struggle, faster you sink! I’ll——”
The brave pledge of help was never given. At the moment when he was within twenty feet of her, Jessica, transfixed, saw him rock and sway, saw one side of him grow suddenly shorter, beheld him, with admirable presence of mind, thrust his left leg out straight along the surface of the sands instead of setting its foot down,, and throw his khaki-clad body over to the left side, thus preventing his weight from falling upon the right leg which had already sunk deep.
He was helpless, caught in a patch of watery quicksands worse, even, than that which imprisoned her, seeing that the sucking sands gave way under the first pressure and let the bottomless water ooze in down deep beneath him.
In that position he was such a strange, in any other circumstances would have been such a ludicrous, figure, swaying on one leg, with the other stuck out level, like a performing acrobat or a barn-yard goose, that a weird shriek of laughter, palsied by terror, rocked forth from the girl’s throat.
Since she had seen the advent of this friendly human being from the sand-hills her fear was not so distracted as it had been, at first, in the drifting boat; whereas, if she had only known it, lying in a pool of water in a dory’s bottom among breakers was safety itself compared with her present peril.