In another few seconds, however, she felt the very framework of her sinking body freeze and stiffen, her heart drop down—down—like a stone which the quicksands swallowed before they devoured the rest of her, for she saw that her would-be rescuer, caught by the leg, with his arms in their khaki sleeves helplessly flapping like brown wings, fingers clutching at air in a desperate attempt to preserve his acrobatic position, was as powerless to extricate himself as she was—and, inch by inch, she was silently sinking farther.
It was as if an invisible monster, with a painless knack, was eating her, bit by bit, alive.
She looked beyond the swaying figure, shrunken upon one side, and saw a bare red head; it seemed to her that in some different world, ages before, she had seen that same red head on a boy outlined in the light of an oily, blazing broom.
She shrieked to the head for help. But somebody fiendishly put a restraining hand upon the shoulder belonging to the head and thrust the boy’s figure back as it began to advance toward her.
And what was this third heartless being doing? He was running away from her. Running up and down, this way and that, in frantic search, upon the beach.
Then, all at once, she heard a shout from him, a sort of defiant bellow wild as the roar of the southwesterly squall in which her sufferings had begun, primitive as the thunder of the surf upon the bar:
“Hólà! Hol’ up! I come!”
Before that big shout the sucking sands seemed to tremble as death, at times, cowers before Life.
It was Life, invincible Life, that was bearing down upon her now, as her glazed eyes dimly saw, a figure instinct with life, courage and resource from its high boots to the red, bobbing thing that danced like flame about its head as it ran.
On his shoulder this strange being carried, like a feather, a ten-foot plank, a stout piece of driftage which in his wild hither and thither search he had picked up on the beach—the beach which, here and there, was starred with silvery driftwood, just as were the Sugarloaf dunes, much of it being traveled logs or planks, lumber-waifs, swept across the bay from the mouth of some Maine river.