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But now, although the gale had not yet reached the boat, the waves were leaping up the beach in foam, and their back-wash gave forth a roar like that of distant thunder.
It took nearly an hour's hustling and urging and galloping before the horses could be persuaded to attempt the swim, and then only after old Roper had been partly dragged and partly hauled through the back-wash by the amphibious Jackeroo. Another half-hour slipped by in sending the horses' hobbles across on the pulley that ran on the wire, and in the hobbling out of the horses.
Three years had passed, and along the wilderness road was swelling a fuller tide of emigration, hot with the fever of the west. Meeting it in counter-current went the opposite flow of the faint-hearted who sought only to put behind them the memory of hardship and suffering but that was a light and negligible back-wash from an onsweeping wave. Caleb Parish smiled grimly.
In the smooth back-wash beyond the black cup of the pool a mass of gathered foam gleamed weirdly in the dark; and, further away, broad tangles of river-weed, dotted with the pale petals of countless flowers, floated on the shallow trout-reach extending from the village gardens to the cornfields below the old, grey church.
Sometimes a counter-tide would sweep a whole flotilla out to sea, when never a man of the hunting crew would be heard of more. Sometimes, when the hunters were daring a gale, riding in on the back of a storm to catch the sea-otter driven ashore to the kelp beds for a rest, the back-wash of a billow, or a sudden hurricane of wind raising mountain seas, would crash down on the brigade.
I had my first bathe from a Pacific beach that morning; and, given just a shade more of venturesomeness in the outsetting, it had been like to be my last. In Livorno Bay the breakers were big, and the back-wash of their surf very insistent.
It is even worse than that; for some trades which had been subject to the concentrating force of the factory system, have fallen into a sort of back-wash of the industrial current, and broken up again into smaller units. The increased proportion of the clothing industries conducted in private houses and small workshops is the most notorious example.
But that was a long way off yet, and he wished to bring himself to the final surrender, strong and clean-hearted, not a vessel broken on the back-wash of existence. And yet he had no true guide for the years that stretched before him. This last episode of the debate seemed to bring it home to him more clearly.
Tommy said, energetically, "No, I'll not. The old woman is going to make my supper for me, and I'll not disappoint her, if I'm drowned in trying." So the boat raced towards the bay, bows under. Nearing the Carr, where a narrow passage opens into smooth water, a strong back-wash came from the jagged rocks.
Here the sweeping tides and booming back-wash keep up such a roar of tumbling seas, the shy, wary otter, alert as an eagle, do not easily get scent or sound of human intruder. Surf washes out the scent of the man track.
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