Springing up, dropping the oars heedlessly--her heart almost bursting--the girl rose from her seat, then shrieked aloud--sending her voice in the direction where now there loomed before her eyes a blur beneath the moon's glimmer which she knew to be a boat. "Paz," she cried, "Paz, it is not true, say it is not true. Oh! Paz, where is he?"
"Where you wish. Where you tell me put him," the other called back, while still beneath the brawny, muscular strokes of the Indians rowing it, the boat swept on toward the shore. "Beneath the waves or soon will be. Breaking to pieces on Shark's Tooth Reef. Paz never forget."
"Beast! devil!" the girl cried in her agony, forgetting, or recalling with redoubled horror, that what had been done was her own doing, was perpetrated at her suggestion. "Return and help me to save him. Oh! come back."
But the boat was gone, was but a speck now beneath the moon, and she was alone upon the sea, over which the wind howled as it lashed it to fury at last.
"The Shark's Tooth Reef," she murmured. "The Shark's Tooth Reef, The worst of all around. Yet--yet--if caught on that, the yawl may not sink. Oh! oh!" and she muttered to herself some wild unexpressed words that were doubtless a prayer. Then she grasped the oars once more, which, since they were fixed by loops on to thole pins instead of being loose in rowlocks, had not drifted away as might otherwise have been the case, and set the boat toward the spot where the Shark's Tooth Reef was as nearly as she could guess.
"If I can but reach it," she muttered to herself. "If I can but reach it."
But now her labours were more intense than before, her struggles more terrible. For, coming straight toward the bow of the boat, the Atlantic rollers beat it back with every stroke she took, while also they deluged it with water, so that she knew ere long it must sink beneath the waves. Already there were three or four inches in the bottom--nay, more, for the stretchers were half-covered--another three of four and it would go down like lead. And each fresh wave that broke over the bows added a further quantity.
"To see him once again; only to see him though if not to save," she moaned--weeping at last; "to see him, to be able to tell him that though I sent him to his doom I loved him," while roused by the thought, she still struggled on, buffeted and beaten by the waves; breathless, almost lifeless--but still unconquered and unconquerable.
Suddenly she gave a gasp, a shriek. Close by her, rising up some twenty feet from the sea, there was a cone-shaped rock, jagged and serrated at its summit; black, too, and glistening as, in the rays of the fast rising young moon, the water streaming from off it. It was the Shark's Tooth Reef, so called because, from its long length of some fifty yards (a length also serrated and jagged like the under jaw of a dog), there rose that cone-shaped thing which resembled what it was named from.
And again she shrieked as, looking beyond the base of the cone, peering through the hurtling waves and white filmy spume and spray, she saw upon the further edge of the base of the reef a black, indistinct mass being beaten to and fro. She heard, too, the grinding of that mass against the reef, as well as its thumps as it was flung on and dragged off it by the swirling of the sea; she heard, how each time, the force of the impact became louder and more deadly.