about him. Four men, naked or half-naked, sprawled near him breathing heavily. In the east the sun stood an hour high. The air was very still.
Against the blue sky a white-headed eagle circled on motionless wings. In a small gray-green bush across the hollow a wren sang merrily. Above a ridge of sand thirty feet away Lachlan saw the head of a whitetail buck appear, heard the buck's snort of astonishment as he wheeled and vanished. From beyond the dunes came the continuous moan of the surf. Suddenly Lachlan remembered.
It came crowding back into his mind—a torrent of memories, confused yet vivid. Most vivid of all was one.
He was in the water fighting his way towards a great floating timber, a fragment of the Good Fortune, to which several men were clinging. He knew that he could not reach it, but he fought on.
At last he clutched for it, missed, and knew that he was done. But a hand reached out, grasped him, drew him up on the timber. Later he realized that the man next to him, the man who had saved him, was Lance Falcon.
All this seemed vastly remote, as though it had happened months ago. He remembered vaguely that, after an eternity, the sea had cast them ashore in the dusk, that they had staggered across the narrow beach to the sandhills beyond and had flung themselves down on the soft sand.
Lachlan got slowly to his feet. He felt somewhat
