changing her position she had lost her balance and stumbled, and the child had fallen from her very arms into the sea!
"Sit down, say! Sit down for your lives!" cried Eversham. "The boat will be swamped!" The packages of plate in the middle were shifting perilously, falling against each other. Too late! Lurching violently on the very crest of the roller, the boat toppled, plunged, and then cast out its load—men, women, boys, cars, all—pell-mell together.
For two or three seconds—the kind that seem an eternity—Philip Touchtone, thrown sidelong, struggled in the sea, conscious of but two things. He gripped the gunwale with one hand, half his body submerged. The other was upstretched, and with the palm and each finger pressing with the strength of iron levers, as it seemed, it held back Gerald Saxton from falling out, over his shoulders. Gerald had been hurled against the gunwale, not over it. Philip pushed upward and hung on. The boat righted itself. Lightened of its load, the succeeding wave lifted it like a withered leaf. It swirled it, eddying onward into the fog, out of the reach of those other strugglers in the
