Parting the hair from the sadly bruised and battered face, she looked vainly into closed eyes for any light of life. She laid her hand where the heart should be beating; she placed her lips close, nay, almost touching, livid lips, to catch a faintest breath; she did all those passionately desperate things that one may do, feeling that another life may depend on each lapsing moment’s effort. She had nothing to cut the lashings which bound him to the wreck, and tore at them furiously, vainly, with her teeth. There was a hard, dry sobbing in her throat, and her features worked convulsively as she paused, exhausted, and gazed down at that white, quiet face. She was ready again to despair. She could not leave him; would no help come? The sun seemed oppressively hot and cruel—a staring, insulting fullness of daylight.
Help was coming. She heard a cheerful woman’s voice singing a negro melody in the wood. Miranda had evidently expected that Miss Sullivan’s circuit would bring her to the beach and had come to join her.
Miss Sullivan essayed to scream, but could not. Miranda came to the bank, and seeing her standing like a ghost, vainly striving to beckon, divined the whole in an instant and sprang down the steps.
“Is he dead?” cried Miranda.
The formalising of a dreaded thought into words makes its terrors doubly terrible.
“Dead! I fear so,” said Miss Sullivan, very slowly and with a shiver.
“He shan’t die if we can help it,” said Miranda resolutely. “Here, Miss Mary, you run right up to the second field. Up there, Uncle Jake’s out with the boys, seeing if they can mow after the shower. Bring ’em down quick—I’ll cut him loose.”
Suiting act to word, she whipped out a jagged penknife of schoolmarm days from her pocket, and began to saw at the lashings.
Miss Sullivan clambered, panting, up the cliff and plunged into the wood. Presently she appeared at a run, followed by Uncle Jake and the two boys—biggish boys of six feet two.
Miranda had cut the lashings of rotten stuff. Uncle Jake supported the man in his arms. He was perfectly insensible.