"And this Captain is not going to cast anchor at all since the
tide will suffice?" said Conseil, simply.
Before daylight, the chill of the water and the passage of the hours had sobered me sufficiently to make me wonder what portion of the Straits I was in, and also to wonder if the turn of the tide wouldn't catch me and take me back ere I had drifted out into San Pablo Bay.
Daylight, after I had been four hours in the water, found me in a parlous condition in the tide-rips off Mare Island light, where the swift ebbs from Vallejo Straits and Carquinez Straits were fighting with each other, and where, at that particular moment, they were fighting the flood tide setting up against them from San Pablo Bay.
The girl pulled the hood of a cloak she wore, over her head and over her face, and, looking backward so that the front folds of this hood were turned down the river, kept the boat in that direction going before the tide. Until now, the boat had barely held her own, and had hovered about one spot; but now, the banks changed swiftly, and the deepening shadows and the kindling lights of London Bridge were passed, and the tiers of shipping lay on either hand.
The very basket that you slept in, the tide washed ashore.
Our oarsmen were so fresh, by dint of having occasionally let her drive with the
tide for a minute or two, that a quarter of an hour's rest proved full as much as they wanted.
We had built her upon a low bank of the river close to where it emptied into the sea, and just above high
tide. Her keel we had laid upon several rollers cut from small trees, the ends of the rollers in turn resting upon parallel tracks of long saplings.
When they reached the firm sand that marked high
tide, I was dropped, and none too gently.
There appeared before me a little opening of the land, and I found a strong current of the
tide set into it; so I guided my raft as well as I could, to keep in the middle of the stream.
"As the
tide makes to-day," said the fisherman, "there wouldn't have been water enough to drown a kitten on that side of the Spit, an hour since."
And he painfully subsided into the little boat, which started, favored by wind and
tide, for the coast of France.
This time I picked out another word, "
tide." Then I had a flash of hope.