“Take it easy,” said the white-haired man with the pale, thin face. “You’re going to be all right, Miss Nancy. I didn’t recognize you at first.”
“But I am,” he assured her. “You asked us to come out and look for Tommy and here we are.”
“We’re on our way to pick him up now,” Vernon explained. “But you’d better lie down now and keep yourself quiet or you won’t be able to greet him when we take him aboard.”
He forced her to lie down, and she glanced across to see others looking after Mabel and Hilda.
“You may not find him,” she said wearily. “A person can stand just so much.”
She felt it would not be so terrible after all if Tommy were really dead. Those who had known bitter depths of suffering had told her many times that there were things worse than death, and in those awful days adrift she had learned it was true. She had even stopped praying that Tommy might live. How could she have been so cruel all along as to try to hold him to a life of such hardships?
“A plane has already been over the island,” Vernon explained in answer to her doubts. “A man signaled us from the beach. It must’ve been Tom.”
“We thought we heard a plane yesterday. Why didn’t you rescue him then?”
“There was no place to land. Only a seaplane can get near him.”
The great motors of the plane roared into action again as Vernon finished speaking. He motioned her to lie back and rest, for even his voice was not yet strong enough to carry above that roar.
Nancy had a struggle to force her mind to any degree of calmness. The swift changes of the last few minutes and her renewed hope about Tommy brought an enervating reaction.
Though the island where Tommy had been marooned was the goal of their sailing from the time Olan learned of it, Nancy could scarcely believe they had actually come within reasonable range of it. That the rescue expedition, which she had instigated back on Koshu Island, would be the means of saving her own life, too, seemed now almost uncanny. This war had certainly woven some strange and incredible designs into the tapestry of life.
So relieved was she to sink into the comfort of that berth and know she would be taken back to safety, that not even her suspense about Tommy kept off her drowsiness as the plane gained height. She felt as she once had when going under an anesthetic.