There were a couple of dories drawn up above high-water mark; and he knew where a pair of old battered oars were hidden under a row of bathing-houses close by. He drew them out and threw them on the sand. Then he looked at the seaweed in his way,--little windrows of it littering the beach, and dark masses rolling in the surf. The tide had been going out about three hours.
"I can get through that easily enough," he said.
He dragged the lightest of the dories down to the water's edge, and put in the oars. He knew just how it should be launched, and understood the necessity of sending it straight across the breakers, and of never, by any chance, letting them strike it sidewise.
Placing himself at the upper end, he waited for a good wave, and pushed the boat into it,--running with it until his feet were almost in the water, then holding it firmly until another wave lifted it. Just as that was subsiding, he gave the dory another push, leaped in at the same time, caught up the oars, and had them in the rowlocks and in the water just as the third wave came.
So far, so good. He had done the same thing many times before, and had never met with an accident. Two or three sturdy strokes, and he would have been safe outside the rollers. But at a critical moment he paused to look at a few spatters of water on his new clothes; and on the instant one of his oars caught in a whirling tangle of kelp.
The boat was going out swiftly in one direction; the billow that bore the kelp was rushing in with tremendous force in the other. No one knows the power of a wave, who has not felt it at some such crisis. What happened was over so quickly that Olly himself could not have explained it. A brief struggle, a terrible wrench, a buffet in the breast and face from the end of an oar,--and he was lying on his back in the dory with his heels above the thwarts.
For a few seconds he lay there, half stunned by the blow and the fall. His breath seemed to have been quite knocked out of his body. It did not take him long to recover it, however, and to reverse the positions of his head and his heels. When he did so, he found the boat swinging around broadside to the breakers, with one threatening at that very moment to overwhelm it.