Page 278 - for-the-term-of-his-natural-life

all around them. It seemed impossible that they should live
until morning. But Rufus Dawes, with his eyes fixed on
some object visible alone to him, hugged the child in his
arms, and drove the quivering coracle into the black waste
of night and sea. To Frere, sitting sullenly in the bows, the
aspect of this grim immovable figure, with its back-blown
hair and staring eyes, had in it something supernatural and
horrible. He began to think that privation and anxiety had
driven the unhappy convict mad.
Thinking and shuddering over his fate, he fell—as it
seemed to him— into a momentary sleep, in the midst of
which someone called to him. He started up, with shaking
knees and bristling hair. The day had broken, and the dawn,
in one long pale streak of sickly saffron, lay low on the left
hand. Between this streak of saffron-coloured light and the
bows of the boat gleamed for an instant a white speck.
‘A sail! a sail!’ cried Rufus Dawes, a wild light gleaming
in his eyes, and a strange tone vibrating in his voice. ‘Did I
not tell you that I saw a sail?’
Frere, utterly confounded, looked again, with his heart
in his mouth, and again did the white speck glimmer. For
an instant he felt almost safe, and then a blanker despair
than before fell upon him. From the distance at which she
was, it was impossible for the ship to sight the boat.
‘They will never see us!’ he cried. ‘Dawes—Dawes! Do
you hear? They will never see us!’
Rufus Dawes started as if from a trance. Lashing the
sheet to the pole which served as a gunwale, he laid the
sleeping child by her mother, and tearing up the strip of