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He realised at last that he was about to die; that, standing there on that reeling deck as he did in the full strength and prime of lusty manhood, with all his energies mental and physical at their best, the sands of his life had so nearly run out that the few last grains were even now falling in the hour-glass of his fate.
Crash followed crash, as each billow lifted the doomed vessel, and let her fall on the sands with a shock that no structure made by man could long withstand. Next moment a terrific rending overhead told that one, or both, of the masts had gone by the board. At the same time the sea found entrance and poured down hatchways and through opening seams in cataracts.
'But, mother, you went as you promised to the sands in Church Cove, and you waited for the ebb of the tide? 'I did. 'And you found 'Nothing; no corpse exposed. 'And you went again the next day? 'I did. 'And you found 'Nothing. 'But how many days have passed, mother? How many days have I been lying here? 'Seven. 'And no sign of of the body was to be seen? 'None.
Kate took out her knife and also began to cut kelp, and I threw pebbles in the hope of hitting a spider which sat complacently on a stone not far away, and when he suddenly vanished there was nothing for me to do but to whittle kelp also. "Do you suppose," said Kate, "that Mrs. Sands really made you know about that shower?"
And it was no less relieved and varied in elevation than in outline by the different forms of the shore, the beach in some places being edged by steep rocks, and in others rising smoothly from the sands in easy and swelling slopes.
"I got 'em off they trampled me and beat me down, but I got their pens open. Twenty-one livin' and me on the sands!" He wondered stupidly how he had done it. The stern of the Marie Louise had burned off and sogged down in deep water, but her bow hung to the reef, and in smoke and flame he had fought the cattle over it.
Bob's strong head bowed, his iron will bent, and meekly his soul murmured, "Thy will be done." That night he married Beulah Sands. The minister who united the grown-up man and the woman who was as a new-born babe saw nothing extraordinary in the match.
"You have won," says the soldier, laying down his money. "Good-night." The Rhine is a fine stream, though our German friends will build mock-castles upon it, and insist that it is the only real river in the world. Auburn Risque pays no more regard to it than though he were treading the cedars and sands of New Jersey or North Carolina.
"Somewhere, near us, in an indeterminable direction, a drum was rolling, the mysterious drum of the sands. It was beating distinctly, now with greater resonance and again feebler, ceasing, then resuming its uncanny roll.
'Hold on a little longer! Yet his will had been sapped by the long hours of the night and the terror of the dawn; and courage, which with him had rested only on the sands of ostentation, had crumbled long ago. "I turned away, overcome by a sickening sensation; I couldn't look longer. Lee Fu waited tensely, peering ahead and to windward with lightning glances. A wave caught us, flung us forward.
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