Had he been half an hour sooner he would have seen a boat, without oars, gasoline-propelled, shooting across the quiet water.  What he did see was an Arangi.  True, it was far larger than the Arangi he had known, but it was white, it was long, it had masts, and it floated on the surface of the sea.  It had three masts, sky-lofty and all of a size; but his observation was not trained to note the difference between them and the one long and the one short mast of the Arangi.  The one floating world he had known was the white-painted Arangi.  And, since, without a quiver of doubt, this was the Arangi, then, on board, would be his beloved Skipper.  If Arangis could resurrect, then could Skippers resurrect, and in utter faith that the head of nothingness he had last seen on Bashti’s knees he would find again rejoined to its body and its two legs on the deck of the white-painted floating world, he waded out to his depth, and, swimming dared the sea.

He greatly dared, for in venturing the water he broke one of the greatest and earliest taboos he had learned.  In his vocabulary was no word for “crocodile”; yet in his thought, as potent as any utterable word, was an image of dreadful import—­an image of a log awash that was not a log and that was alive, that could swim upon the surface, under the surface, and haul out across the dry land, that was huge-toothed, mighty-mawed, and certain death to a swimming dog.

But he continued the breaking of the taboo without fear.  Unlike a man who can be simultaneously conscious of two states of mind, and who, swimming, would have known both the fear and the high courage with which he overrode the fear, Jerry, as he swam, knew only one state of mind, which was that he was swimming to the Arangi and to Skipper.  At the moment preceding the first stroke of his paws in the water out of his depth, he had known all the terribleness of the taboo he deliberately broke.  But, launched out, the decision made, the line of least resistance taken, he knew, single-thoughted, single-hearted, only that he was going to Skipper.

Little practised as he was in swimming, he swam with all his strength, whimpering in a sort of chant his eager love for Skipper who indubitably must be aboard the white yacht half a mile away.  His little song of love, fraught with keenness of anxiety, came to the ears of a man and woman lounging in deck-chairs under the awning; and it was the quick-eyed woman who first saw the golden head of Jerry and cried out what she saw.

“Lower a boat, Husband-Man,” she commanded.  “It’s a little dog.  He mustn’t drown.”

“Dogs don’t drown that easily,” was “Husband-Man’s” reply.  “He’ll make it all right.  But what under the sun a dog’s doing out here . . . " He lifted his marine glasses to his eyes and stared a moment.  “And a white man’s dog at that!”

Jerry beat the water with his paws and moved steadily along, straining his eyes at the growing yacht until suddenly warned by a sensing of immediate danger.  The taboo smote him.  This that moved toward him was the log awash that was not a log but a live thing of peril.  Part of it he saw above the surface moving sluggishly, and ere that projecting part sank, he had an awareness that somehow it was different from a log awash.