In sheer self-defence he captured the thrashing sheet and twisted it round a cleat. The jib untoggled itself from the stay, bellied out full, and the boat began to move slowly down the slope. The joy of it sent the blood up into Jim's head and set it spinning. He would have a run--just a little run--all by himself, just to prove to himself that he could do it. The boat went rocking down the slope. He hauled at the halyard in a frenzy, and the mainsail went jumping up. He made it fast, grabbed his beloved tiller, and the _Gracie_, with a roll and a shake, bounded away up the flats. Faster and faster she went, the ribbed sands and the wind-whipped pools seemed to sweep along to meet her and fly beneath her all-devouring wheels, till Jim's head was spinning faster even than they. He yelled and waved his arms above his head, till the tiller banging him in the ribs nearly knocked him overboard and recalled him to his duties. He was at the bend in the coast before he knew It. He threw his weight on to the tiller to bring her round on the curve which would allow her head to fall off on the other tack, but fooled it somehow, and instead she flew off at a tangent straight for the sea. "Ecod!" said a watcher--for other purposes--in the sand-hills. "'Oo's gooin' reet to stick-sands!"--and started at a run after the _Gracie_. Jim always stoutly maintained that if he had only had room enough he would have got her round all right. But space and time were wanting. All in a moment the solid ground seemed to vanish from below the whirling wheels. One wheel sank down into comparative space, the other spun on horizontally; the _Gracie's_ nose went down out of sight into a squirming mass of slimy sand, and Jim was flung head over heels into the midst of it. He got his head up with his mouth full of watery sand which half choked him. Before he had coughed it out, fear and the clammy sand gripped him together. It clung to him like thick treacle. His feet and legs were bound and weighted--he could not move them. And when his arms got into it the deadly sand clasped them tightly. It was up to his chest, like cold dead giant arms folding him tighter and tighter in a last embrace, or the merciless coils of a boa-constrictor. Presently it would have him by the throat, and the stuff would run into his mouth and choke him, and he would die and they would never find him. He tried to shout, with little hope of any one hearing; but it was all he could do. The clammy death was at his throat, and the pressure on his chest was so great that his shout was of the feeblest. Another minute and the riddle of Carne would have been solved. But feeble as was his shout, it was answered. The runner on the sands came panting up, and the sight of his anxious face was to Jim as the face of an angel out of heaven--and a great deal more, for Jim had never troubled much about angels. "Help--Seth!"--he bubbled, through the sandy scum.