n many instances swept completely
away. Close at hand--not twenty feet from the cabin--lay windrows of
seaweed, left there by the spent wash of the great wave. Death, swift,
sweeping, terrible, had been diverted only by the high bank that stood
below the cabin.

It seemed incredible, monstrous, that they all should have slept
peacefully while the mass of water was rolling in on them from the
deep. Kayak Bill, who had once seen a tidal wave on Bering Sea,
pictured it advancing in the grey unnatural night from the far reaches
of the ocean, growing larger and larger as it neared the shallows off
Kon Klayu, and then, tossing its dancing crest to the sky in gigantic
abandon, curling down from aloft in green-white, crushing splendor and
flinging itself far over the beachline in its endeavor to encompass
them all.

Without waiting for breakfast the men went down to the spot where the
little lake had been. Nothing but a dark ooze remained. Every block
of gold-carrying turf, every puddling-box, sluice and tool had been
carried out to sea. The work of weeks had come to naught. Their last
hope of gold was gone.

During the gloomy fortnight that followed it was the food supply,
however, and not the calamity of the tidal wave that was subject of the
most discussion. With the exception of flour there was little left of
the outfit that had been landed on Kon Klayu, and to the consternation
and chagrin of the men, they discovered that Loll was the only one who
could slip up on the sea-parrots and kill them with a club. Shane and
Harlan and even Kayak Bill tried it repeatedly with no success. They
were unable to creep down under the low-growing brush in a manner
stealthy enough to reach the birds. Even Loll found it impossible to
approach them in the open, and they grew more wary day by day. Six
people depended on the child for nourishing food, and Lollie, after
that first wild morning when he had discovered his ability to kill the
birds, found his tender heart revolting against his bloody task.

Ellen, slowly recovering her strength now that sea-parrot broth had
been added to the daily fare, had become painfully intuitive in the
matter of all those phases of the situation which Shane and the others
clumsily tried to keep from her. Though apparently asleep, she knew
the instant that Shane crept from his bed in the very early mornings
before the sun had dried the dew on the tundra. She could hear him
tip-toe into Lolli