Page:Strange Tales Volume 02 Number 03 (1932-10).djvu/63

 Hewitt swam easily, lazily, revelling with satisfaction in the stimulating clear water which in these latitudes is like a sustained caress to the body.

He had never felt so much at ease in the water before. It seemed, however, quite natural to him now. It fitted, precisely, into what had grown to be his expectations during the past few days on the ship. It was as though latent, untried powers deep within him had been stimulated and released by the strange, mental experience he had undergone during those few hours of his unconsciousness. He dived deeply, and all the processes involved—the holding of the breath, the adjustment of muscular actions and reactions, the motions of underwater swimming—were as natural and effortless as though he had been, he told himself musingly, really amphibious.

Unnoticed by him, the remainder of the swimming party, only about half of whom he had met, retired to the beach and spread themselves in little sociable groups along the sandy edge. A few lingered in the shallows.

E was floating on his back, the little waves of that calm sea lapping against his cheeks when he heard faintly the terrified, cutting scream of a girl. He treaded water, and looked towards the beach, where he saw the various members of the large party rushing towards a young girl whom he had not especially noticed before. The girl was one of those who had remained in the shallows, and as he looked he saw many hands extended towards her, and drawing her upon the sand, and he saw, too, a pinkish froth of fresh blood about the place from which she had emerged.

Something seemed to snap inside his brain. That terrible, atavistic, inexplicable sense of combat, the desire to rend and tear suffused him. In the grip of this strange, primitive, savage urge, he turned abruptly and dived straight down to where a flickering gray shadow passed; to where an enormous barracuda slowed to turn for its lightning rush at its second victim. Hewitt sped down like a plummet, exulting

A moment later the attention of the group on the beach was distracted from the young girl whose foot had been cruelly gashed by the sea-tiger’s teeth, to a seething, foaming, writhing thing that rose from the calm surface of the sea a hundred feet out from the beach, struggled furiously on the lashed surface for a few seconds, and then as abruptly disappeared in a tortured mass of foam. A sunburned young Navy doctor went on binding up the girl’s foot, but the rest, wonder-stricken, silent, scanned the surface eagerly for another glimpse of this strange, titanic combat. “What is it?” “What can it be?” The questions ran from mouth to mouth.

The barracuda rose again, this time within twenty feet of the beach, and Hewitt lay locked along the steel-gray back, his hands closed in a viselike grip about the terrible jaws, his tensed muscles corded with the fearful strain. Over and over, sidewise, backwards, forward, moved fish and man as one, locked together in dives and turns and dashes so swift as to baffle the gaping eyes of the amazed onlookers, standing now in a wondering, intrigued row upon the edge of the sand. And always, with great, powerful lunges of feet and sweeps of elbows and hand and knees, now above, now beneath, but ever unrelaxed in that deadly grip, on the frothing surface or in the quiet depths, Hewitt forced his demon antagonist towards the beach.