Poor boys!
Unhappy Jack.
Luckless Harry Girdwood.
The fall from such a height to the water would render death almost a certainty.
Hand and foot bound, they could not move.
Yet stay.
Could it be possible that these n.o.ble boys were to fall victims to the villainy of such ruffians?
No.
As they reached the bottom, the two boys, momentarily deprived of their senses by the fall, were partially restored by the shock.
Instinctively the knives go to work.
Young Jack here rendered the most signal service.
He held his knife in a tight grip even as they fell.
And barely did they come in contact with the bed of the ocean, when young Jack stabbed upwards, and, at a single stroke, cut his way out of the sack.
At the self-same instant his left hand grappled his friend and trusty comrade Harry.
To kick the earth fiercely with his feet was to Jack a natural impulse, and striking upwards, he made for the surface.
Will he reach it?
Doubtful.
It seemed a weary, weary way to get.
But now the water grows lighter and less dense.
Jack and Harry can see about them.
Both are experienced swimmers and divers, and they always keep their eyes open under water. And now this habit serves them in good stead, for looking up, Jack perceives a huge floating ma.s.s bearing down upon him through the water.
Jack and Harry have Fleon"s words, and the cruel jokes of Barthes, still ringing in their ears, and they know, alas too well what it means.
A shark.
With the energy of despair, both boys strike out, diving lower.
And now for a moment their fate seems sealed.
They discover that their rapid movements are stopped by the sack, which they have not got quite clear of, and which, puffed, follows them up through the water in their progress to the air and light.
And this, by a miracle, saves them.
The voracious monster of the deep strikes for the two boys, but its unwieldy body not answering its helm with the swiftness of an ordinary fish, it shoots fairly into the ripped-up sack, in which it gets its huge maws entangled.
A strange trap for a shark.
A shark trapped by no more cunning contrivance than a canvas sack, ripped up on one side.
And while the fierce beast wallows about in this novel trap, lashing the water furiously with its fins, the two boys gain the surface of the water, marvelling at their escape.
Together they turn over on their backs, and gulp down big draughts of the welcome air.
Presently they get their breath again.
"Jack, old boy, are you safe?" was Harry"s question.
"For the present, Harry, old chum. How do you feel?"
"Saved, thank Heaven!"
"G.o.d bless you, old man."
Thus the two boys, rescued from such a complication of perils, pa.s.s their first moments in getting a gasp of Heaven"s fresh air.
Each is full of thankfulness for the other"s escape, and for the moment thinks but little of himself.
Suddenly young Jack reverts to their last danger.
"Where is he, the monster?" he asks, with great eagerness.
"The shark?"
"Yes."
"Don"t know."
"Doesn"t relish us."
"Fancies we shan"t be tender after getting out of prison so recently."
Young Jack and Harry were only just out of the jaws of death, and already they were joking.
"Have you got your wind yet, Harry?"
"Then follow me. I can see a sort of archway in the prison wall, and a boat, I think."
"Hah!" cried Harry, "I remember."