The red-crested being with the long thing on his shoulder came abreast of the brown manly figure still balancing itself upon one leg in the quicksands,—made a movement as if to lay down the plank as a bridge toward it.
But the Eagle Scout, racked with the effort to keep his left leg stuck out level upon the yielding surface, while his right had sunk to the thigh, shrieked at him:
“Don’t mind me!... Her!”
And almost immediately thereupon Jessica felt two hoisting hands under her armpits which were only a few inches above the sandy surface now. A figure loomed beside her balancing itself upon the long plank laid down over the watery sands, that brine-whitened plank supporting it in the same way that long snow-shoes will support a man upon soft snow where, without them, he would sink to his neck.
And now began the desperate tug of war between Life and Death, the fight for a girl’s life!
Captain Andy had classed it as the one feat of rescue next to impossible, to save a victim more than half of whose body had sunk in a patch of quicksands. At another time he had spoken of those sands which sucked in water beneath the surface as “clinging like a cat,” a clawed wildcat, to anything on which they got a sucking hold.
He had told how they would grip an upright board partially sunk in them as in a mould, so that no strength of his could dislodge it.
But if the sands held on to their prey like a wildcat, the being upon the plank, with a ruddy tassel bobbing about his swarthy face, like a live flame flickering out from the fire in his body, had the fierce tenacity of a bulldog.
The froth came out upon his lip as he strained every sinew to raise the girl’s body an inch, to lift her by her armpits and shoulders.
The breath fairly shrieked through his nostrils and open mouth with his hoisting struggles, as if he were a derrick with a whining pulley inside him.