Keeping her speed down, Hike slowly swung across to the triangle of beach and dipped. The man slipped down his trapeze—safe! on dry land!
He yelled twice, for joy, then staggered toward the cliff and began to climb. Already Hike was circling back to the wreck. As he passed the cliff, the left end of the machine missed it by only three feet. Even Hike shuddered at the thought of what would have happened if he had run full tilt into the cliff, and crumpled up the Hustle.
But he drove back to the wreck, and again some one—a woman, this time, terrified, and twice missing the rope before she climbed into the trapeze—was taken ashore.
The wreck was fast breaking up, and Hike hurried as much as he could. While carrying some one, he had to take it slow, but on his return trips he hurled the Hustle out into the gale as though he were racing.
There were thirty persons on the wreck. As he landed the seventeenth (who was the yacht-owner) on the safe beach, he was thinking hard. Two things he had noticed; that the tide was filling up the triangle of beach, so that his passengers had to climb up out of dangerous undertow that now surged over what had been safe land; and that he had to hurry, because the fragile yacht was fast breaking up.
Yes, he had to hurry—but he didn’t want to run into the cliffs he had barely missed. He thrust the elevating plane sharply up, and shot toward the top of the rock-wall so straight that the tetrahedral seemed to stand on her tail.
Poodle clutched the sides of his seat. He saw his feet up as high as his head, and felt as though he were falling backwards. He gasped, and before he had finished gasping, his heart missed a beat.
For—still standing on her tail—the Hustle was caught in a terrible flaw of wind, and hurled a hundred feet up into the air. A breaker had brought in a draft that, shooting up through a treacherous gap in the cliffs, became a treacherous whirlwind.
Hike’s heart thumped, too. He wished that Martin Priest were at the levers. But he kept hold of himself. He turned down the elevating planes; then raised them slightly, then shot them down again; and rode over the column of lifting air into a calm space.
He swung back to the wreck, determined to make quicker work of the rest of the rescue. The waves were increasing and the yacht could not stand much more.