He had come to a belt of water where the tide set inward very rapidly, along a gulley or deep of the shore water. It was a godsend to him, for his pursuers were still in the outer tide. He was now not a quarter of a mile from the water-mark, and still going strong, with perhaps two hundred yards between the boat and him; he could not feel their hot breath upon his neck, but he could hear the rhythmic yell of the officer astern, criticising the moral characters of his crew with a regular emphatic cadence that followed the stroke of the oars ... when his cold, numbed right foot struck something; then his left struck sand: ... It was England! And the English statesman, like Antæus, was glad and was refreshed. He stumbled along out of it--the water on the shelving sand was here not three feet deep. He stumbled and raced along through the splashing water. It fell to his knees, to his shins, to his ankles, and he was on dry land! A very pretty problem for the amateur tactician learned in the matter of landing-parties, was here presented. The dinghy must ground far out: she could not be abandoned; it was an even race, and his pursuers would be one man short from the necessity of leaving some one in a boat which had grounded too far out for beaching. Some such combination occurred in a confused way to Demaine, but he had no time for following it up. He did what he had done more than once in the last unhappy days--he ran. His numbed feet suffered agonies upon the shingle above the sand, but he ran straight inland, he crossed a rough road, went stumbling over a salted field, and made for a wind-driven and scraggy spinney that lay some half a mile inland, defying the sea winds. As he approached that spinney he saw two men from the boat just coming full tilt over the ridge of the sea road; as he plunged into it they were in the midst of the field beyond. The undergrowth in the spinney was thick, but Demaine had the sense to double, and he crept cautiously but rapidly along, separating the thick branches as noiselessly as he could, and bearing heroically with the innumerable brambles that tore his flesh. He halted a moment to look through a somewhat thinner place towards the field, and there, to his considerable astonishment, he perceived the two sailor-men dawdling along in amicable converse and apparently taking their time, as though they were out upon a holiday rather than in the pursuit of a criminal.