"We'll come across something to eat soon," said Frank Merrill, breathing
hard. "Then we'll be all right."
"I feel - better - for that run - already," panted Billy Fairfax.
"Haven't seen a black spot for five minutes."
Nobody paid any attention to him, and in a few minutes he was paying no
attention to himself. Their expedition was offering too many shocks of
horror and pathos. Fortunately the change in their mood held. It was,
indeed, as unnatural as their torpor, and must inevitably bring its own
reaction. But after each of these tragic encounters, they recovered
buoyancy, recovered it with a resiliency that had something almost
light-headed about it.
"We won't touch any of them now," Frank Merrill ordered peremptorily.
"We can attend to them later. They'll keep coming back. What we've got
to do is to think of the future. Get everything out of the water that
looks useful - immediately useful," he corrected himself. "Don't bother
about anything above high-water mark - that's there to stay. And work
like hell every one of you!"
Work they did for three hours, worked with a kind of frenzied delight in
action and pricked on by a ravenous hunger. In and out of the combers
they dashed, playing a desperate game of chance with Death.
Helter-skelter, hit-or-miss, in a blind orgy of rescue, at first they
pulled out everything they could reach. Repeatedly, Frank Merrill
stopped to lecture them on the foolish risks they were taking, on the
stupidity of such a waste of energy. "Save what we need!' he iterated
and reiterated, bellowing to make himself heard. "What we can use now -
canned stuff, tools, clothes! This lumber'll come back on the next
tide."
He seemed to keep a supervising eye on all of them; for his voice,
shouting individual orders, boomed constantly over the crash of the
waves. Realizing finally that he was the man of the hour, the others
ended by following his instructions blindly.
Merrill, himself, was no shirk. His strength seemed prodigious. When any
of the others attempted to land something too big to handle alone, he
was always near to help; and yet, unaided, he accomplished twice as much
as the busiest.
Frank Merrill, professor of a small university in the Middle West, was
the scholar of the group, a sociologist traveling in the Orient to study
conditions. He was not especially popular with his companions, although
they admired him and deferred to him. On the other hand, he was not
unpopular; it was more that they stood a little in awe of him.