Up leaped the flames. A brilliant glow wavered and spread. Colton, stupid with horror, stood entranced, while Johnston, Helga and Haynes ran, as if to established stations, along the surfs edge, the old man nearest the wreck, then Haynes, and finally the girl. Of a sudden, Colton came to himself with a dismal and unaccustomed sensation of being out of it. No one had asked him to help. He was just a guest, a negligible quantity when men’s and women’s work was to be done.
“What a useless thing the average summer boarder must be!” he thought, as he passed beyond the girl and bent his attention on the boiling cauldron of the ocean.
He had not long to wait. On the foaming crest of a breaker something dark appeared, and vanished in the smother of the surge as it whizzed up the sand. Another instant, and it was rolling within a rod of the young fellow, showing the set, still face of a man. Colton hardly had to wade ankle-deep to seize the form; but the back drag tore at his feet with a power that amazed and appalled him. To haul the man ashore took all his unusual strength. As he threw the form over his shoulder and ran toward the fire, he became aware of a man and a woman approaching from the cliff side. Laying down his burden, he knelt beside it. One look was enough. The man’s skull had been crushed like an egg-shell. Mechanically he felt for the pulse, when Professor Ravenden’s precise tones, rendered a little less pedantic by the effort required to overcome the gale, reached his ear:
“Perhaps I can be of some service. I am not entirely unskilled in medical subjects.”
Colton shook his head. “He’s beyond all skill,” he answered.
“Oh!” cried a voice from the darkness behind the professor, rising to a shriek. “Look! Helga! Help her!”
At the same moment, Helga’s own ringing voice sounded in a call for aid, abruptly cut short. Colton jumped to his feet and turned. He saw, with a sickening recollection of the waves’ power, which he had just experienced, the girl up to her knees in water, her strong young frame braced back and her arms clasping a body. A fringed comber, breaking heavily, was driving a vortex of white water in upon her. It boiled up beyond her, and the two figures were gone. As Colton, with a shout of horror, leaped forward, like a sprinter from the mark, he saw Haynes, running with terrific speed, launch himself head foremost into the swirl of waters, at a rolling mass there.
“Lord! What a tackle!” thought Colton as he ran. “Yet they say that a foot-ball education is of no practical use.”
His own was to come swiftly into play. For though Haynes had caught Helga about the knees, he had no purchase for resistance, and the deadly undertow was dragging them out.
Colton had the athlete’s virtue of thinking swiftly in the stress of action. His was the cool courage that appreciates peril and reasons out the most advantageous encounter. The human flotsam was far beyond his grasp now; but he figured that an approaching surge, sweeping them in shoreward again, would give him his chance,—the only chance,—for the recession in all probability would carry them beyond help. He must meet them feet forward, as a trained player meets and falls upon a foot-ball rolling toward him; thus he might get his heels into the sand, and so anchor them all against the back-drift. If he could not—well, there were no materia medica bottles out there beyond the surf anyhow, and an ocean lullaby would be the sure cure for all sleeplessness.