Strong Hearts | Page 8

and forth along the crest, tossing his arms,
waving his Madras handkerchief, cursing himself for leaving his gun so
far behind, and again and again repeating his vain ahoys in wilder and
wilder alternations of beseeching and rage. The lessening craft flew
straight on, no ear in her skilled enough to catch the distant cry, and no
eye alert enough to scan the dwindling sand-hills. He ceased to call, but
still, with heavy notes of distress to himself, waved and waved, now
here, now there, while the sail grew smaller and smaller. At length he
stopped this also and only stood gazing. Almost on first sight of the
craft he had guessed that the men in her had taken alarm at the signs of
changing weather, and seeing the freshening smoke of his fire had also
inferred that earlier sportsmen were already on the island. Oh, if he
could have fired one shot when she was nearest! But already she was as
hopelessly gone as though she were even now below the horizon.
Suddenly he turned and ran down to his camp. Not for the gun; not in
any new hope of signalling the yacht. No, no; a raft! a raft! Deliverance
or destruction, it should be at his own hand and should wait no longer!
A raft forthwith he set about to make. Some stout portions of his boat
were still left. Tough shrubs of the sand-hills furnished trennels and
suppler parts. Of ropes there was no lack. The mast was easily dragged
down again to the beach to be once more a mast, and in nervous haste,
yet with skill and thoroughness, the tent was ripped up and remade into
a sail, and even a rude centreboard was rigged in order that one might
tack against unfavorable winds.
Winds, at nightfall, when the thing began to be near completion, there
were none. The day's sky had steadily withdrawn its favor. The sun
shone as it sank into the waves, but in the northwest and southeast
dazzling thunderheads swelled from the sea's line high into the heavens,
and in the early dusk began with silent kindlings to challenge each
other to battle. As night swiftly closed down the air grew unnaturally
still. From the toiler's brow, worse than at noon, the sweat rolled off, as
at last he brought his work to a close by the glare of his leaping
camp-fire. Now, unless he meant only to perish, he must once more eat
and sleep while he might. Then let the storm fall; the moment it was
safely over and the wind in the right quarter he would sail. As for the

thirst which had been such a torture while thwarted, now that it ruled
unchallenged, it was purely a wild, glad zeal as full of method as of
diligence. But first he must make his diminished provisions and his
powder safe against the elements; and this he did, covering them with a
waterproof stuff and burying them in a northern slope of sand.
He awoke in the small hours of the night. The stars of the zenith were
quenched. Blackness walled and roofed him in close about his
crumbled fire, save when at shorter and shorter intervals and with more
and more deafening thunders the huge clouds lit up their own forms,
writhing one upon another, and revealed the awe-struck sea and ghostly
sands waiting breathlessly below. He rose to lay on more fuel, and
while he was in the act the tornado broke upon him. The wind, as he
had forecast, came out of the southeast. In an instant it was roaring and
hurtling against the farther side of his island rampart like the charge of
a hundred thousand horse and tossing the sand of the dunes like blown
hair into the northwest, while the rain in one wild deluge lashed the
frantic sea and weltering lagoon as with the whips of the Furies.
He had kept the sail on the beach for a protection from the storm, but
before he could crawl under it he was as wet as though he had been
tossed up by the deep, and yet was glad to gain its cover from the
blinding floods and stinging sand. Here he lay for more than an hour,
the rage of the tempest continually growing, the heavens in a constant
pulsing glare of lightnings, their terrific thunders smiting and bellowing
round and round its echoing vault, and the very island seeming at times
to stagger back and recover again as it braced itself against the fearful
onsets of the wind. Snuggling in his sailcloth burrow, he complacently
recalled an earlier storm like this, which he and Sweetheart, the only
other time they ever were here, had tranquilly weathered in this same
lagoon. On the