Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 4 (1925-04).djvu/49

this little time with you here on this tiny island."

She was crying now, softly and brokenly. Jeff felt a sudden panic of terrible tenderness surge through him. Here was the woman his cynical heart had long told him he would never find, in those dead years before the sea had become his Lethe—the one woman of all. And he was not to have her, except in death! Again there came to his lips that strange, ironical smile of the seafaring man.

Suddenly the water was about them and they were fighting in a tangle of plants and trees and serpents—hideous things that writhed among them but did not sting, more terrified even than they, instinctively thinking the one primal thought, salvation.

Choking, gasping, stunned, blinded, somehow Jeff managed to keep Janice beside him. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it ended—and Little Island was no more.

Jeff found himself swimming in a morass of forest riffraff, using only one arm, bearing up the now unconscious Janice with the other. He did not know whether she lived or not, but he clung to her desperately. Once he grasped and hurled from her a huge snake that had crawled upon her to save itself.

Then, when the first ferment of the waters above the sunken island had subsided, he looked about for something to cling to, in that inherent will to fight to the end which is one of the wonders of mankind. And presently his search was rewarded. A giant palm came drifting by. He caught it as it rose on a mountain-high billow and lifted Janice upon it. Swimming beside it, he held her there.

Presently her eyes opened, and Jeff, seeing she lived, was warmed through and through with a mighty happiness. He silently vowed he would play this game with fate till fate sat beaten.

Other trees and pieces of trees came drifting by, and before morning Jeff, by an almost superhuman exertion of his great strength, had managed to interlace four or five of them into a makeshift raft, binding them with ropelike strips of bark, so that, when the sun rose, they rose, insecurely, on the subsided swells of a calming ocean.

And there to the west, well within view, was an oncoming ship.

Huddled close together on their shaky raft, Jeff and Janice looked into each other's eyes. Then they laughed and their lips met. But it was a prayer.

A half hour later, when they had been picked up and stood upon the deck of the rescuing steamer (it was the Rochester, bound for New Orleans) Jeff pointed off across the water toward the direction where Little Island had been. Janice looked.

On the rolling surface of the so-called Pacific rode a small boat, bottom-side up.