The sight gave me pause: and for a moment I stood reconnoitring the men. To advance or not was the question, and I was still debating it, and striving to deduce something from the men's appearance, when something, I never knew what--perhaps some noise ill-apprehended--led me to turn aside my head. Whatever the cause of the movement, it apprised me of something little suspected. Not fifty paces behind me I saw the figure of a giant horseman looming out of the mist. He was advancing along the summit of the sea-wall below which I stood; hence I saw him before he made me out: and this gave me the start and the advantage. I had time to take in the thing, and seize my horse by the head, and move eight or ten paces towards the boat before he took the cue. Then on neither side was there any concealment. With a cry, a yell rather, the mere sound of which flung me into a panic, the man urged his horse down the bank shouting fiercely to me to stand; I in utter terror spurred mine across the beach towards the men I had seen. I have said that I had some sixty yards of start, and two hundred or so to cross, to reach the boat; but the horses were scarcely able to trot; a yard was a furlong; and the sand swallowing up the sound of hoofs, it was a veritable race of ghosts, of phantoms, labouring through the mist across the flat, with the oily Stygian sea lapping the shore beside us. He cried out in the most violent fashion, now bidding me stay and now bidding the men stop me. And for all I know they might be in his pay, or at best be some of the reckless desperadoes who on that coast live by owling and worse practices. But they were my only hope and I too cried to them; and with joy I saw them put in again--they had before got afloat. Believing Smith to be gaining, I cried pitifully to them to save me, and then my horse stumbling, I flung myself from the saddle, and plunged through the sand towards them. At that, two sprang out to meet me and caught me under my arms; and in a moment, amid a jargon of cries in a foreign tongue whipped me over the side into the boat. Then they pushed it off and leaped in themselves, wet to the thighs; and as my pursuer came lurching down the beach, a pistol drawn in his hand, a couple of powerful strokes drove the boat through the light surf. Waving frantically he yelled to the men to wait, and rode to his boot-soles into the water; but with a jeering laugh and a volley of foreign words the sailors pulled the faster and the faster, and the mist lying thick on the water, and the boat sitting low, in half a minute we lost the last glimpse of him and his passion, and rode outward on a grey boundless sea. CHAPTER XXXIX