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 entered the inlet's shallow mouth was the only chance, and Norman alone had been cool enough to recognize it. Rusty might not have been able to explain all this in detail; but if he had perished in the huge ocean surges into which his master had hurled him, he would have gone down knowing that Norman had done for him all that any man could do. Of this sort was Rusty's love and Rusty's faith.

The sun was two hours high when the little red dog came ashore. A great white-maned comber tossed him on the upper beach and left him there, to all outward seeming stone dead. A long while he lay where the wave had left him, sprawled on his side, limp and motionless. With that wave the storm tide reached its crest; and, magically, when the tide had turned and the ebb had set in, the wind, which had slackened to a stiff breeze, died away altogether, the gray blanket vanished from the face of the sky and the warm May sunshine fell like a blessing upon beach and ocean. Of all this Rusty, inert on the white sand, the flame of life flickering feebly in his brine-soaked body, knew nothing. Nor did he know that the grim storm scavengers of the aerial patrol were abroad and that already their scouts had spied him from the upper air.