Those seconds were fraught with momentous issues.
Almost exhausted as I was, I found it the battle of my life to persist to the end, but it chanced that the wave upon which we had been borne was the first of a trio, the others following unusually speedily upon its heels.
They saved the day.
Like driftwood almost, I was lifted up, carried shoreward and deposited on my knees in the sand—then came the last wave washing me still farther up the strand.
I was done for—my breath, my strength had utterly given out, and I could not have raised an arm to have saved myself had the sea attempted to claim us again.
Fortune willed otherwise, and we had at least a last single chance for life.
There is no telling how long I might have lain there, gasping for breath, gurgling out the salt water I had taken into my lungs, only that there suddenly flashed through my mind, as by a ray of light, the remembrance of the precious life that had been intrusted to my care.
That gave me a new and desperate lease of power; I seemed to once again feel the warm blood pulsating through my veins, and be endowed with physical vigor.
Still, such was my utter exhaustion I must have staggered to my feet like a man of three-score years and ten.
There lay the painted buoy and Hildegarde’s precious, water-draggled form; how pitiable it looked with the long golden hair streaming about her person; what a shiver it gave me to think how she resembled one drowned with the seaweed clinging to her hair.