“Be quiet, Crusoe!” I commanded, threatening him with my spade.  The madness of the treasure-lust possessed me.  I was panting now, and my hands began to feel like baseball mitts, but still I dug.  Crusoe had ceased to importune me; vaguely I was aware that he had got tired and run off.  I toiled on, pausing now and then for breath.  I was leaning on my spade, rather dejectedly considering the modest excavation I had achieved, when I felt a little cool splash at my feet.  Dropping my spade I whirled around—­and a shriek echoed through the cave as I saw pouring into it the dark insidious torrent of the returning tide.

How had I forgotten it, that deadly thing, muttering to itself out there, ready to spring back like an unleashed beast?  Crusoe had warned me—­and then he had forsaken me, and I was alone.

And yet at first, wild as my terror was, I had no thought but that somehow I could escape.  That these waters were for me the very face of death, sure and relentless, terrible and slow, did not at once seize hold upon my heart.

Frantically I sprang for the entrance on the cove.  The floor of the cave was sloping, and the water deepened swiftly as I advanced.  Soon I was floundering to my knees, and on the instant a great wave rushed in, drenching me to the waist, dazing me with its spray and uproar, and driving me back to the far end of the cave.

With a dreadful hollow sucking sound the surge retreated.  I staggered again toward the archway that was my only door to life.  The water was deeper now, and swiftly came another fierce inrush of the sea that drove me back.  Between the two archways a terrible current was setting.  It poured along with the rush of a mountain river, wild, dark, tumultuous.

I had fled to the far end of the cave, but the sea pursued me.  Swiftly the water climbed—­it flung me against the wall, then dragged me back.  I clutched at the naked rock with bleeding fingers.

Again, after a paroxysm during which I had seemed to stand a great way off and listen to my own shrieks, there came to me a moment of calm.  I knew that my one tenuous thread of hope lay in launching myself into that wild flood that was tearing through into the cove.  I was not a strong swimmer, but a buoyant one.  I might find refuge on some half-submerged rock on the shores of the cove—­at least I should perish in the open, in the sunlight, not trapped like a desperate rat.  And I began to fight my way toward the opening.

And then a dreadful vision flashed across my mind, weighed down my feet like lead, choked back even the cry from my frozen lips.  Sharks!  The black cutting fin, the livid belly, the dreadful jaws opening—­no, no, better to die here, better the clean embrace of the waters—­if indeed the sharks did not come into the cave.

And then I think I went quite mad.  I remember trying to climb up to the ledge which hung beetling fifteen feet above.  Afterward my poor hands showed how desperately.  And I remember that once I slipped and went clear under, and how I choked and strangled in the salt water.  For my mouth was always open, screaming, screaming continually.