Like me, Rita was a child of stress and storm. She loved to feel the strong wind in her face and hair. She gloried in the taste of the salt spray. She thrived in the open and sported in the free play of her agile limbs. Unafraid, and daring to recklessness, nothing seemed to daunt her; nothing, unless, maybe, it were the great, cruel, sharks' teeth of The Ghoul over which the sea was now breaking, away out there at the entrance to the Bay: that rock upon which she had been wrecked in her childhood; that relentless, devilish thing that had robbed her of her mother and of her birthright.
Even then, as she and I scampered and scrambled along the shore line, over the rocks and headlands,—whenever she gazed out there I fancied I detected a shudder passing over her.
For an hour, with nothing to do but pass the time, we kept on and on, along the shore, until we reached Neil Andrews' little house on the far horn of the Crescent, standing out on the cliffs.
We stood on the highest rock, in front of the old fisherman's dwelling, watching the huge waves rolling in and breaking on the headlands with deafening thundering, showering us with rainbow sprays and swallowing up the sounds of our voices.
Rita kept her eyes away from the horrible rock, which seemed so much nearer to us now than when we were in the far back shelter of the Bay. And, indeed, it was nearer, for barely a quarter of a mile divided it from Neil's foreshore. But such a quarter of a mile of fury, I had never before seen.
Different from Rita, I could hardly take my eyes away from that rock. To me, it seemed alive in its awful ferocity. It was the point of meeting of three different currents and it gave the impression to the onlooker that it was drawing and sucking everything to its own rapacious maw.
Old Man Andrews saw us from his window and came out to us, clad in oilskins and waders.
"Guess it's making for a hum-dinger, George," he roared into my ears. "Ain't seen its like for a long time. God help anything in the shape of craft that gets caught in this. She's sprung up mighty quick, too.
"Got a nice cup of tea ready, Rita. Come on inside, both of you. It ain't often I see you up here. Come on in!"
But Rita was standing apart, straining her eyes away far out into the Gulf.