What made the channel was the fresh-water stream.Coral cannot abide fresh water.What made the channel race was the immense shoreward surf-fling of the sea.Unable to remain flung up on the beach, pounded ever back toward the beach by the perpetual shoreward rush of the kanaka surf, the up-piled water escaped to the sea by way of the channel and in the form of under-tow along the bottom under the breakers.Even in the channel the waves broke big, but not with the magnificent bigness of terror as to right and left.So it was that a canoe or a comparatively strong swimmer could dare the channel.But the swimmer must be a strong swimmer indeed, who could successfully buck the current in.Wherefore the captain of Number Nine continued his vigil and his muttered damnation of malahinis, disgustedly sure that these two malahinis would compel him to launch Number Nine and go after them when they found the current too strong to swim in against.As for himself, caught in their predicament, he would have veered to the left toward Diamond Head and come in on the shoreward fling of the kanaka surf.But then, he was no one other than himself, a bronze.Hercules of twenty-two, the whitest blond man ever burned to mahogany brown by a sub-tropic sun, with body and lines and muscles very much resembling thewonderful ones of Duke Kahanamoku.In a hundred yards the world champion could invariably beat him a second flat; but over a distance of miles he could swim circles around the champion.
No one of the many hundreds on the beach, with the exception of till captain and his crew, knew that the Bartons had passed beyond the diving- stage.All who had watched them start to swim out had taken for granted that they had joined the others on the stage.
The captain suddenly sprang upon the railing of the lanai, held on to a pillar with one hand, and again picked up the two specks of heads through the glasses.His surprise was verified.The two fools had veered out of the channel toward Diamond Head, and were directly seaward of the kanaka surf.Worse, as he looked, they were starting to come in through the kanaka surf.
He glanced down quickly to the canoe, and even as he glanced, and as the apparently loafing members quietly arose and took their places by the canoe for the launching, he achieved judgment.Before the canoe could get abreast in the channel, all would be over with the man and woman.And, granted that it could get abreast of them, the moment it ventured into the kanaka surf it would be swamped, and a sorry chance would the strongest swimmer of them have of rescuing a person pounding to pulp on the bottom under the smashes of the great bearded ones.
The captain saw the first kanaka wave, large of itself, but small among its fellows, lift seaward behind the two speck-swimmers.Then he saw them strike a crawl-stroke, side by side, faces downward, full-lengths out- stretched on surface, their feet sculling like propellers and their arms flailing in rapid over-hand strokes, as they spurted speed to approximate the speed of the overtaking wave, so that, when overtaken, they would become part of the wave, and travel with it instead of being left behind it.Thus, if they were coolly skilled enough to ride outstretched on the surface and the forward face of the crest instead of being flung and crumpled or driven head-first to bottom, they would dash shoreward, not propelled by their own energy, but by the energy of the wave into which they had become incorporated.
And they did it!"SOME swimmers!" the captain of Number Ninemade announcement to himself under his breath.He continued to gaze eagerly.The best of swimmers could hold such a wave for several hundred feet.But could they? If they did, they would be a third of the way through the perils they had challenged.But, not unexpected by him, the woman failed first, her body not presenting the larger surfaces that her husband's did.At the end of seventy feet she was overwhelmed, being driven downward and out of sight by the tons of water in the over-topple.Her husband followed and both appeared swimming beyond the wave they had lost.
The captain saw the next wave first."If they try to body-surf on that, good night," he muttered; for he knew the swimmer did not live who would tackle it.Beardless itself, it was father of all bearded ones, a mile long, rising up far out beyond where the others rose, towering its solid bulk higher and higher till it blotted out the horizon, and was a giant among its fellows ere its beard began to grow as it thinned its crest to the over-curl.
But it was evident that the man and woman knew big water.No racing stroke did they make in advance of the wave.The captain inwardly applauded as he saw them turn and face the wave and wait for it.It was a picture that of all on the beach he alone saw, wonderfully distinct and vivid in the magnification of the binoculars.The wall of the wave was truly a wall, mounting, ever mounting, and thinning, far up, to a transparency of the colours of the setting sun shooting athwart all the green and blue of it.The green thinned to lighter green that merged blue even as he looked.But it was a blue gem-brilliant with innumerable sparkle-points of rose and gold flashed through it by the sun.On and up, to the sprouting beard of growing crest, the colour orgy increased until it was a kaleidoscopic effervescence of transfusing rainbows.
