Children of the Storm

unduly worried. He began to circle the whole broad hilltop, peering in, hoping to spot them as if they were animals in their natural habitat and he a visitor to this complex zoo.
        Ten minutes later, he had not found them.
        Not a trace.
        He stood in the rain, oblivious of it, of the wind and even of the music of sword fights.
        He realized that the woman, the crazy damned woman, had taken the Dougherty kids deeper into the island, and by the grace of some sixth sense, he also knew that, as ridiculous as it sounded, she intended to take them all the way to Hawk House.
        Where there was help for her.
        “No!” he shouted.
        But shouting at the wind didn't make the situation any better, didn't make the truth any less true.
        In his excitement to be after her, consumed by both disbelief and by fear that she would succeed in her goal, he turned and ran toward the third hill in the island's chain, tripped over an exposed root and went down, hard, his knife turning back on him like a slippery eel and gouging the palm of his right hand.
        Blood dripped into the sand.
        He looked at it, disbelieving.
        He sucked the wound, examined it when he had it sucked clean, watched new blood well up.
        It wasn't so bad.
        Not bad enough to stop him, anyway.
        He stood, picked up the knife, looked at it with new respect.
        This was the first time that he had ever been hurt by his own knife, and he felt like a betrayed father, amazed at the scandalous doings of a bad son.
        He carefully folded the knife.
        He put it in his pocket, where he could get it easily when he caught up to the three of them.
        Then he started after them at a more reasonable pace than he had first employed-though, he was sure, at a pace that far outstripped their own…

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    TWENTY-SEVEN
        
        Between the third and the fourth hills, in the third ravine that they had to cross, Sonya found that the brown water was deeper than it had been either of the first two times she had had to wade through it. She tried crossing it alone, without either of the children in her arms, to test its depth, and though she tried it at several places along its banks, she found that it always rose to her chin and would, in a few more steps, go well above her head before she would reach the other side and the slopes of the fourth hill.
        She would never be able to carry Alex and Tina across a pool so deep as that, not even if she could hold her breath and carry them high above her head on rigidly extended arms.
        And she did not have that kind of strength now.
        She had not even had it when they'd first set out from Seawatch-an eternity ago.
        Yet she would not let the obstacle defeat her. If she stopped now, Peterson or Jeremy or whatever you wanted to call him would be onto them before long. She looked back at the kids, saw that Tina was lying on the ground, her head in her brother's lap, while he sat with his back against a palm bole. They were both nearly coated with mud so that they appeared to be little Negro children, and still they were cute, more precious than anything else. Certainly, more important than the condition of her legs and her back.
        She studied the pool, which was approximately thirty-five feet across, only dangerously deep for half that distance or, at most, for no more than twenty feet. It was a width that kept her from walking it under water, especially with one of the kids as a burden, but it would be a relatively simple thing to swim across.
        She could not expect Alex or Tina to swim it, of course, not in their present condition, for they were minute-by-minute closer to utter collapse. But if she could find…
        A couple of minutes later, she located a three-foot-long log which lay in underbrush hardly more than thirty yards from where they had stopped. She strained, hefted it off the ground and held it across her arms as if it were a baby, and, struggling with it as if it weighed a ton instead of, maybe, forty or fifty pounds, she carted it to the edge of the pool and dropped it into the water, watched it sink, rise. She pushed it off a ways, so it would be in deeper water.
        It floated.
        She waded in, pulled it back, stuck it in the mud at the edge of the water, and went to get Alex.
        Tina, still with her head in her brother's lap, had fallen asleep,