"Ecod!" said a watcher--for other purposes--in the sand-hills. "'Oo's gooin' reet to stick-sands!"--and started at a run after the Gracie.
Jim always stoutly maintained that if he had only had room enough he would have got her round all right. But space and time were wanting.
All in a moment the solid ground seemed to vanish from below the whirling wheels. One wheel sank down into comparative space, the other spun on horizontally; the Gracie's nose went down out of sight into a squirming mass of slimy sand, and Jim was flung head over heels into the midst of it.
He got his head up with his mouth full of watery sand which half choked him. Before he had coughed it out, fear and the clammy sand gripped him together. It clung to him like thick treacle. His feet and legs were bound and weighted--he could not move them. And when his arms got into it the deadly sand clasped them tightly. It was up to his chest, like cold dead giant arms folding him tighter and tighter in a last embrace, or the merciless coils of a boa-constrictor.
Presently it would have him by the throat, and the stuff would run into his mouth and choke him, and he would die and they would never find him.
He tried to shout, with little hope of any one hearing; but it was all he could do. The clammy death was at his throat, and the pressure on his chest was so great that his shout was of the feeblest.
Another minute and the riddle of Carne would have been solved. But feeble as was his shout, it was answered. The runner on the sands came panting up, and the sight of his anxious face was to Jim as the face of an angel out of heaven--and a great deal more, for Jim had never troubled much about angels.
"Help--Seth!"--he bubbled, through the sandy scum.
"Ay, ay, sir!" panted young Seth, and jumped on to the half-submerged Gracie, whipped out his knife from its sheath at his back, and sliced the stays of the mast and had it out in a twinkling.
"Lay holt!"--and he shoved it towards the disappearing Jim. "And hang on tight, if it teks yore skin off! That's it. Twist rope round yo'!" And he dug his heels deep into the firm sand beyond, and laid himself almost flat as he hauled at his end of the mast.