“You’ve found him?”
“We’re on our way to pick him up now,” Vernon explained. “But you’d better lie down now and keep yourself quiet or you won’t be able to greet him when we take him aboard.”
He forced her to lie down, and she glanced across to see others looking after Mabel and Hilda.
“You may not find him,” she said wearily. “A person can stand just so much.”
She felt it would not be so terrible after all if Tommy were really dead. Those who had known bitter depths of suffering had told her many times that there were things worse than death, and in those awful days adrift she had learned it was true. She had even stopped praying that Tommy might live. How could she have been so cruel all along as to try to hold him to a life of such hardships?
“A plane has already been over the island,” Vernon explained in answer to her doubts. “A man signaled us from the beach. It must’ve been Tom.”
“When?” she asked.
“Yesterday.”
“We thought we heard a plane yesterday. Why didn’t you rescue him then?”
“There was no place to land. Only a seaplane can get near him.”