But the impulse to go on grew no less in Alan. It quickened with
the straining eagerness of the _Norden_ as the slim craft leaped through
the water.
Even the drone of thunder and the beat of rain urged him on. To him
there was nothing absurd in the quest he was about to make. It was the
least he could do, and the only honest thing he could do, he kept
telling himself. And there was a chance that he would find her. All
through his life had run that element of chance; usually it was against
odds he had won, and there rode with him in the gray dawn a conviction
he was going to win now--that he would find Mary Standish somewhere in
the sea or along the coast between Eyak River and the first of the
islands against which the shoreward current drifted. And when he
found her--
He had not gone beyond that. But it pressed upon him now, and in moments
it overcame him, and he saw her in a way which he was fighting to keep
out of his mind. Death had given a vivid clearness to his mental
pictures of her. A strip of white beach persisted in his mind, and
waiting for him on this beach was the slim body of the girl, her pale
face turned up to the morning sun, her long hair streaming over the
sand. It was a vision that choked him, and he struggled to keep away
from it. If he found her like that, he knew, at last, what he would do.
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