Something slightly grazed Dave's arm as he concluded this rather mournful soliloquy. He grabbed out at the touch of the foreign object, but missed it. Then a second like object floated against his chest. This the lad seized.
It proved to be a piece of wood, part of a dead tree, about three inches in diameter and two feet long. Dave retained the fragment, although scarcely with the idea of using it as a float.
To his surprise these fragments, some large, some small, continued to pass him. In fact, he seemed in a sort of wave-channel, which caught and confined them, forming a species of tidal trough.
One piece was of quite formidable size. Dave threw his arms over it with a good deal of satisfaction, for it sustained his weight perfectly.
"Queer how I happened right into their midst. Where do they come from, anyhow?" reflected Dave. "Is it a hopeful sign of land?"
There was a lull in the tempest finally, but the darkness still hung over all the sea like a pall. Dave longed for daybreak. The discovery of the driftwood had given him a good deal of courage and hope.
For over eight hours Dave rocked and drifted, at the mere caprice of the waves. Wearied, faint, and thirsty, he tried to cheer himself thinking of the possibility of land near at hand.
Daylight broke at last, but a dense haze like a fog hung over the waters for an hour before the sun cleared it away. Eagerly Dave scanned in turn each point of the compass. A great sigh of disappointment escaped his lips.
"No land in sight," he said; "just the blank, unbroken ocean."
His plight was a dispiriting one. Dave felt that unless succor came in some shape or other, and that, too, very soon, his chances of ever seeing home and friends again were indeed remote.