So far, so good. He had done the same thing many times before, and had never met with an accident. Two or three sturdy strokes, and he would have been safe outside the rollers. But at a critical moment he paused to look at a few spatters of water on his new clothes; and on the instant one of his oars caught in a whirling tangle of kelp. The boat was going out swiftly in one direction; the billow that bore the kelp was rushing in with tremendous force in the other. No one knows the power of a wave, who has not felt it at some such crisis. What happened was over so quickly that Olly himself could not have explained it. A brief struggle, a terrible wrench, a buffet in the breast and face from the end of an oar,--and he was lying on his back in the dory with his heels above the thwarts. For a few seconds he lay there, half stunned by the blow and the fall. His breath seemed to have been quite knocked out of his body. It did not take him long to recover it, however, and to reverse the positions of his head and his heels. When he did so, he found the boat swinging around broadside to the breakers, with one threatening at that very moment to overwhelm it. Instinctively he seized an oar and pulled with all his might to head the dory to the wave. He succeeded, and sent it careening safely over it and the next great swell, and so out to sea. But it was at the expense of the oar. It was an old one, much worn by the friction of the rowlocks, and his last stroke broke it short off at the weak point. The paddle-end fell overboard, and only the handle remained in his hand. He then turned to look for the other oar, and found that he had lost it at the time of his tumble. He could see it going over on a breaker, several rods behind him. For now the wind took the dory, and was wafting it away almost as rapidly as if it carried a sail. He tried paddling with the stub that remained in his hand, but made so little headway with it that he began to be seriously alarmed. He had been sufficiently startled by his accident and the danger of an overturn in the rollers; but he now saw himself in face of an unforeseen peril. He at first thought he would jump overboard and swim to the beach; but even then he remembered his clothes, which a wetting might ruin--to say nothing of Mr. Hatville's watch. There was, besides, another danger. The kelp! He was a good swimmer; but could he ever make his way through breakers in which such fields of sea-weed tossed and rolled? The night was shutting down with gathering clouds. The wind struck the skiff with a force he had not felt under the lee of the woods. Not a human being was in sight, nor a boat--only two or three distant sails on the horizon. "Oh, the yacht! Where is the yacht?" he cried aloud, gazing eagerly around the point of rocks, the view beyond which was rapidly opening as he drifted out to sea.