Screaming with the sudden pain, he pulled his arm loose, the wheel moving easily back again to the compression point. He thought some horrid, lurking creature of the depths had bitten him and he swam to the surface, in a panic of fear, and agonized with pain. He did not dare to use his one sound arm to feel of the other for fear of sinking again into that submerged jungle. The wounded arm was all but useless, the hand had no strength, and he was suffering torture. Besides, he felt giddy and kept himself from swooning by sheer will power, strengthened by the imminent peril of drowning. Yet the few seconds that elapsed before he won the doubtful shelter of the rock were fraught with even greater danger than he knew, and it was in a half-conscious state that he wriggled onto the slippery, unseen mass and lay across it, swept by the dashing water, panting, suffering, and trying to keep his senses. It was only the same Wilfred Cowell who had made a simple promise to his mother—the same Wilfred Cowell cast in a new but not more tragic role.... What he set out to do, he would do though all the world of boys cast stones at him and the earth fell away beneath his feet. _What he set out to do, he would do._ And stricken here in the darkness, amid the angry elements, he kept his line of communication with actual things open by the sheer power of his will. There was a moment—just a moment—when he thought the slimy points of rock across which he lay were an airplane and that he was being borne upon its mounting wings. But he shook off this demon tempting him into oblivion and kept his senses. He felt very weak and giddy, the hand of his wounded arm tingled as if it were asleep, his elbow seemed to have lost its pliancy and his whole forearm throbbed, throbbed, throbbed. With his sound arm he swept the neighboring water in a gesture of petulance, the petulance of pain, that gesture of despair and impatience seen in hospitals when an impatient arm is raised and dropped idly on the bed-clothes. But Wilfred’s arm fell upon something else—a human form. The startling discovery acted, for the moment, like a potent drug. He rolled over and, bracing his feet among the crevices in the rock, moved his hand across a ghastly upturned face with streaking hair plastered over it. Here, then, was the delinquent who had taken the launch contrary to rules and gone forth in it challenging these boisterous elements. The face was not recognizable as any that Wilfred had ever seen. It might have been Hervey Willetts; Hervey had never bothered much with Wandering Willie Cowyard. The importance of knowing the full truth gave Wilfred the strength to ascertain it. He had never felt a pulse. But he had lain and stood patiently while doctors had listened at his back and at his chest as if these parts of his body were keyholes. He knew, if anybody did, how to find out if a heart were beating; he was a postgraduate in this.