Chapter Thirty.
A double Predicament.
Short time as their pursuers had stayed upon the strand, it seemed an age to the submerged midshipmen.
On first placing themselves in position, they had chosen a spot where, with their knees resting upon the bottom, they could just hold their chins above water. This would enable them to hold their ground without any great difficulty, and for some time they so maintained it.
Soon, however, they began to perceive that the water was rising around them—a circumstance easily explained by the influx of the tide. The rise was slow and gradual, but for all that they saw that should they require to remain in their place of concealment for any length of time, drowning must be their inevitable destiny.
A means of avoiding this soon presented itself. Inside the line of breakers, the water shoaled gradually towards the shore. By advancing in this direction they could still keep to the same depth. This course they adopted, gliding cautiously forward upon their knees whenever the tide admonished them to repeat the manoeuvre.
This state of affairs would have been satisfactory enough, but for a circumstance that, every moment, was making itself more apparent. At each move they were not only approaching nearer to their enemies, scattered along the strand, but as they receded from the line of the breakers, the water became comparatively tranquil, and its smooth surface, less confused by the masses of floating foam, was more likely to betray them to the spectators on the shore.
To avoid this catastrophe, which would have been fatal, they moved shoreward only when it became absolutely necessary to do so, often permitting the tidal waves to sweep completely over the crown of their heads, and several time threaten suffocation.
Under circumstances so trying, so apparently hopeless, most lads—ay, most men—would have submitted to despair, and surrendered themselves to a fate apparently unavoidable. But with that true British pluck, combining the tenacity of the Scotch terrier, the English bulldog, and the Irish stag-hound, the three youthful representatives of the triple kingdom determined to hold on.