“We’ll come across something to eat soon,” said Frank Merrill, breathing hard.  “Then we’ll be all right.”

“I feel — better — for that run — already,” panted Billy Fairfax.  “Haven’t seen a black spot for five minutes.”

Nobody paid any attention to him, and in a few minutes he was paying no attention to himself.  Their expedition was offering too many shocks of horror and pathos.  Fortunately the change in their mood held.  It was, indeed, as unnatural as their torpor, and must inevitably bring its own reaction.  But after each of these tragic encounters, they recovered buoyancy, recovered it with a resiliency that had something almost light-headed about it.

“We won’t touch any of them now,” Frank Merrill ordered peremptorily.  “We can attend to them later.  They’ll keep coming back.  What we’ve got to do is to think of the future.  Get everything out of the water that looks useful — immediately useful,” he corrected himself.  “Don’t bother about anything above high-water mark — that’s there to stay.  And work like hell every one of you!”

Work they did for three hours, worked with a kind of frenzied delight in action and pricked on by a ravenous hunger.  In and out of the combers they dashed, playing a desperate game of chance with Death.  Helter-skelter, hit-or-miss, in a blind orgy of rescue, at first they pulled out everything they could reach.  Repeatedly, Frank Merrill stopped to lecture them on the foolish risks they were taking, on the stupidity of such a waste of energy.  “Save what we need!’ he iterated and reiterated, bellowing to make himself heard.  “What we can use now — canned stuff, tools, clothes!  This lumber’ll come back on the next tide.”

He seemed to keep a supervising eye on all of them; for his voice, shouting individual orders, boomed constantly over the crash of the waves.  Realizing finally that he was the man of the hour, the others ended by following his instructions blindly.

Merrill, himself, was no shirk.  His strength seemed prodigious.  When any of the others attempted to land something too big to handle alone, he was always near to help; and yet, unaided, he accomplished twice as much as the busiest.

Frank Merrill, professor of a small university in the Middle West, was the scholar of the group, a sociologist traveling in the Orient to study conditions.  He was not especially popular with his companions, although they admired him and deferred to him.  On the other hand, he was not unpopular; it was more that they stood a little in awe of him.

On his mental side, he was a typical academic product.  Normally his conversation, both in subject-matter and in verbal form, bore towards pedantry.  It was one curious effect of this crisis that he had reverted to the crisp Anglo-Saxon of his farm-nurtured youth.

On his moral side, he was a typical reformer, a man of impeccable private character, solitary, a little austere.  He had never married; he had never sought the company of women, and in fact he knew nothing about them.  Women had had no more bearing on his life than the fourth dimension.