“That was a girl’s cry, Stack!” Kenjo Red—Kenjo the youthful signal-man of the blazing broom performance—lifted his red head that flamed like a beacon amid the wet drabness of the dunes and stopped digging with a small shovel in the side of a sand-mound. “A—a girl’s cry!” he repeated, startled.
“By George! it was. Somewhere the lace is screaming for help! A woman—or a girl—must be drowning or sinking—somewhere!” Miles Stackpole jumped to his feet as he spoke, a ludicrously sanded figure; he had almost tunneled right through one sand-hill in a fevered search for the buried treasure which, according to local tradition, had been hidden by some hardy pirate of old among these wild sand-dunes.
The mumbled tale of the aged hunter after one-legged hen-clams to the effect that, about a quarter of a century prior to this squally day, certain gold and silver coins, a handful of them, stamped like no coinage ever current in the United States, had been picked up on, or near, this very spot, had infected Stack with the gold-fever, with a get-rich-quick delirium that showed in his strained eyes as he held his breath for a moment, trying to decide from what quarter came that feminine cry.
Farther off a third figure stood at attention, too, listening with deep snorts, gulping breaths, like those of a woodland moose whose long ear is trained to catch a faint sound on the wind.
A strange, lithe figure this third in a rough blue shirt that showed a brown, sinewy throat, high cowhide boots that reached to the knee, but were as destitute of heels as a Camp Fire Girl’s moccasins, and a bright red knitted cap fitting down over his head, with a scarlet tassel that flirted with the young gust from the east as he stood on a low sand-hill, alert to catch another cry.
Hardly the interval of three seconds elapsed before it came, quivering with the same horrified, passionate terror as the first.
At its first appealing note Stack started off, dashing up the tunneled sand-hill with long springs—like the wild deer that so often traversed these lonely dunes—and down the sandy pyramid upon the other side, landing, breathless, upon the narrow strip of beach for which Jessica had been making. Thence he had a view of the broad, jutting point called the Neck and of its flanking sandspits, brown areas of sand on which the wild tide was slowly encroaching, and of something sticking up like a dark stump from a sinister patch of sands, not thirty yards off, the sinking figure of a girl in a dark sweater, already nearly buried to the waist.
Without a shade of hesitation Miles Stackpole, Eagle Scout, made a valiant dash for the wetter sands to reach that figure.
The agonized victim saw him coming. In a vague way she recognized him. He had no green and red stripes, no rich points of color, embroidered merit badges, upon his sleeve to-day, no swooping eagle upon his breast. But he was the same tanned, eighteen-year-old lad who had taken the heavy deaf-and-dumb child, swamped by a cargo of green apples, from her dripping arms.
“Keep quiet! Don’t move!” he screamed to her. “More you struggle, faster you sink! I’ll——”
The brave pledge of help was never given. At the moment when he was within twenty feet of her, Jessica, transfixed, saw him rock and sway, saw one side of him grow suddenly shorter, beheld him, with admirable presence of mind, thrust his left leg out straight along the surface of the sands instead of setting its foot down,, and throw his khaki-clad body over to the left side, thus preventing his weight from falling upon the right leg which had already sunk deep.
He was helpless, caught in a patch of watery quicksands worse, even, than that which imprisoned her, seeing that the sucking sands gave way under the first pressure and let the bottomless water ooze in down deep beneath him.
In that position he was such a strange, in any other circumstances would have been such a ludicrous, figure, swaying on one leg, with the other stuck out level, like a performing acrobat or a barn-yard goose, that a weird shriek of laughter, palsied by terror, rocked forth from the girl’s throat.
Since she had seen the advent of this friendly human being from the sand-hills her fear was not so distracted as it had been, at first, in the drifting boat; whereas, if she had only known it, lying in a pool of water in a dory’s bottom among breakers was safety itself compared with her present peril.
In another few seconds, however, she felt the very framework of her sinking body freeze and stiffen, her heart drop down—down—like a stone which the quicksands swallowed before they devoured the rest of her, for she saw that her would-be rescuer, caught by the leg, with his arms in their khaki sleeves helplessly flapping like brown wings, fingers clutching at air in a desperate attempt to preserve his acrobatic position, was as powerless to extricate himself as she was—and, inch by inch, she was silently sinking farther.
It was as if an invisible monster, with a painless knack, was eating her, bit by bit, alive.
She looked beyond the swaying figure, shrunken upon one side, and saw a bare red head; it seemed to her that in some different world, ages before, she had seen that same red head on a boy outlined in the light of an oily, blazing broom.
She shrieked to the head for help. But somebody fiendishly put a restraining hand upon the shoulder belonging to the head and thrust the boy’s figure back as it began to advance toward her.
And what was this third heartless being doing? He was running away from her. Running up and down, this way and that, in frantic search, upon the beach.
Then, all at once, she heard a shout from him, a sort of defiant bellow wild as the roar of the southwesterly squall in which her sufferings had begun, primitive as the thunder of the surf upon the bar:
“Hólà! Hol’ up! I come!”
Before that big shout the sucking sands seemed to tremble as death, at times, cowers before Life.
It was Life, invincible Life, that was bearing down upon her now, as her glazed eyes dimly saw, a figure instinct with life, courage and resource from its high boots to the red, bobbing thing that danced like flame about its head as it ran.
On his shoulder this strange being carried, like a feather, a ten-foot plank, a stout piece of driftage which in his wild hither and thither search he had picked up on the beach—the beach which, here and there, was starred with silvery driftwood, just as were the Sugarloaf dunes, much of it being traveled logs or planks, lumber-waifs, swept across the bay from the mouth of some Maine river.
The red-crested being with the long thing on his shoulder came abreast of the brown manly figure still balancing itself upon one leg in the quicksands,—made a movement as if to lay down the plank as a bridge toward it.
But the Eagle Scout, racked with the effort to keep his left leg stuck out level upon the yielding surface, while his right had sunk to the thigh, shrieked at him:
“Don’t mind me!... Her!”
And almost immediately thereupon Jessica felt two hoisting hands under her armpits which were only a few inches above the sandy surface now. A figure loomed beside her balancing itself upon the long plank laid down over the watery sands, that brine-whitened plank supporting it in the same way that long snow-shoes will support a man upon soft snow where, without them, he would sink to his neck.
And now began the desperate tug of war between Life and Death, the fight for a girl’s life!
Captain Andy had classed it as the one feat of rescue next to impossible, to save a victim more than half of whose body had sunk in a patch of quicksands. At another time he had spoken of those sands which sucked in water beneath the surface as “clinging like a cat,” a clawed wildcat, to anything on which they got a sucking hold.
He had told how they would grip an upright board partially sunk in them as in a mould, so that no strength of his could dislodge it.
But if the sands held on to their prey like a wildcat, the being upon the plank, with a ruddy tassel bobbing about his swarthy face, like a live flame flickering out from the fire in his body, had the fierce tenacity of a bulldog.
The froth came out upon his lip as he strained every sinew to raise the girl’s body an inch, to lift her by her armpits and shoulders.
The breath fairly shrieked through his nostrils and open mouth with his hoisting struggles, as if he were a derrick with a whining pulley inside him.
He was a woodsman. In his veins coursed the irresistible life of the woods which when the sap runs freely in the hidden roots of a young tree will make it cleave the solid rock in order to find daylight and grow, if every other outlet is denied it.
It was like cleaving the granite rock to draw this girl’s body, three-parts sunken, back to daylight—a terrible duel between sand and man—in which Jessica felt as if her arms were being torn quivering from their sockets.
But, glory to Life! the man won.
Little by little the quicksands loosened their sucking hold; inch by inch she was lifted until the sands had no further claim even upon her feet in their soaking canvas shoes.
Then, free, she was borne along the bridging plank in the arms which had rescued her and on over the sands to the very first firm spot, where she was thrown down almost violently in the re............