He wore the lightest weight solaro, with a helmet and close-fitting puttees of the same. Two straps crossed his breast, the one supporting a well filled haversack, the other a water bottle. Except for fire arms he was equipped for darkest Africa, or for anything else on earth—at least he supposed so. He was wrong; he was not equipped for what he was about to encounter on Ibis Island.
It happened in this manner: traversing the seaward dunes, because the beach no longer afforded him even a narrow margin for a footing, shoulder deep in a tangle of beach-grapes, he chanced to glance at the little sandy cove which he was skirting, and saw there an empty fruit crate tumbling in the smother of foam, and a very small setter puppy clinging to it frantically, with every claw clutching, and his drenched tail between his legs.
Even while Gray was forcing his eager way through the tangle, he was aware of somebody else moving forward through the high scrub just west of him; and as he sprang out onto the beach and laid his hand on the stranded fruit crate, another[154] hand, slimmer and whiter than his, fell on the crate as he dragged it out of the foamy shallows and up across the dry sand, just as a tremendous roller smashed into clouds of foam behind it.
"I beg your pardon," said a breathless voice at his elbow, "but I think I saw this little dog first."
Gray already was reaching for the shivering little thing, but two other hands deprived him of the puppy; and he looked up, impatient and annoyed, into the excited brown eyes of a young girl.
She had taken the dripping, clawing little creature to her breast, where it shivered and moaned and whined, shoving its cold nose up under her chin.
"I beg your pardon," said Gray, firmly, "but I am really very certain that I first discovered that dog."
"I am sorry you think so," she said, clasping the creature all the tighter.
"I do think so," insisted Gray. "I know it!"
"I am very sorry," she repeated. Over the puppy's shivering back her brown eyes gazed upon Gray. They were very pretty, but hostile.