THE WIND

“THAT’S SO SAD!” said Emma. “Didn’t anyone ever try to dig down and find you?”

“I don’t think anyone did,” said Winston, tucking away his handkerchief. “If Mr. Wenlocke got away alive, he must have been a ruined man; all his money was in that hotel. When he was moving in I helped him carry strongboxes of gold up to his suite, and he told me he’d put them away himself in his hidden safe place.

“And what would he have told all his investors, when the hotel sank? Some of them seemed to be—well, not very nice people. He would probably have had to go away and live incognito somewhere.”

At this point Emma noticed that Winston seemed to be fading again, although he was no longer as upset as he had been. Looking around, she saw that the sky was getting lighter. The long night had ended, and the stars had gone home.

Winston’s voice continued, getting softer now: “In all this time, you’re the first person I’ve seen. I thought you were one of the guests, arriving at last. Sometimes I get confused…”

His voice trailed away into silence, and, as Emma watched, Winston began to vanish: first his face and hands, and then his white uniform, and finally there were only the gleaming brass buttons and the winking gold of his badge. Then the first rays of the rising sun touched the high dune, turning everything gold, and she could no longer see where he had been at all.

“At least he wasn’t a scary ghost,” said Emma to herself.

She got up and added more sticks to her fire, because she knew it’s important to keep your fire going when you’ve been cast away. Then she went to the creek and washed as well as she could without soap or towels. The frogs watched her, and politely hopped from leaf to leaf as she picked blackberries for her breakfast.

It was turning into a bright, clear day, hot as summer but with the tired-looking light of early autumn. Emma remembered what Winston had told her about the Storm of the Equinox coming out of a clear sky. It worried her a little because she was pretty sure that there are two Equinoxes every year, one on the first day of spring and the other on the first day of autumn.

“If this place has such awful weather,” she told herself, “I’d better make myself a much safer place to live.”

So all that day Emma worked hard, walking up and down the beach, dragging more wreckage to her camp. She dug holes and stuck down tree branches and two-by-fours, making a fence to keep the blowing sand out.

That afternoon she found the best thing of all: half-buried in the rippled sand was an aluminum rowboat. Its stern had broken away, but the rest of it was all in one piece. This will never float again, but if I can dig it out, I can turn it upside down and sleep under it, thought Emma. It will be just like a tent, only stronger.

She spent the rest of the day digging out the boat with a piece of plank, and then dragging the boat up the beach to her camp. It was awfully heavy, but she just kept thinking of how nicely it would keep the winter rain out. Besides, she thought, if it’s heavy, it will be hard for the wind to blow it away.

So at last Emma set it down by her fire. Night was falling fast, and the smiling moon was already bright. She had just enough time to collect driftwood for her fire and dig a few clams for her supper before it got dark. The clams did taste a lot better when they were baked in the coals, but Emma was so tired she didn’t care very much. She just wanted to sleep. So, as soon as she had built up the fire, she crawled under the rowboat, curled up, and closed her eyes.

BOOM!

It seemed only a second or so later that Emma was startled awake by wind roaring as loud as a freight train. She looked out from under the rowboat and saw no moon, no stars, but only her little fire fanned to hot flames by the gust. Sand hissed by, piling up against the fence she had worked so hard to build, forming hills that rose and rose and then collapsed, rushing on over the face of the dune. Her hair whipped about her face, and the sand stung her skin.

Emma ducked back under the rowboat, trying very hard to remain calm.

“As long as I stay in here where I can breathe, I’ll be safe,” she told herself. “There’s no use in running out into the night and getting lost.”

So she curled up again, and lay there listening to the sand scouring away at the bottom of the rowboat. But after a while it became dark and hot and stuffy, and Emma realized that the rowboat was being buried by the blowing sand. “Oh, no!” she cried, and got on her hands and knees and pushed upward, bracing her back against the boat.

The rowboat lifted clear of the sand, and cool air came in again. But more sand came blowing in underneath, faster and faster, and it buried her hands and feet. She lifted them free, shaking off the sand. The wind was screaming now, so loud she couldn’t even hear the beating of her own heart. Emma realized that if she lifted the boat too high, even as big and heavy as it was, the wind might snatch it away. She was very scared, but she was even more angry.

“No!” she cried. “I didn’t live through one storm just so another one could get me!”

She clung tightly to the gunwales of the boat, stubbornly pushing it up every time the sand grew too high. She had to keep at it for what seemed like hours, and she was getting very tired, when suddenly someone was there under the boat with her.

“Hold on, Miss Emma!” shouted Winston. He grabbed hold of the gunwale too, and lifted the boat clear of another few inches of sand. “Be resolute!”

“What does resolute mean?” Emma shouted back.

“It means—you won’t give up!” said Winston.

“Then I will be resolute!” said Emma fiercely, and she pushed against the howling wind with all her strength.

They fought the storm for three whole hours, and it got so loud that they couldn’t speak to each other. Emma found it strange that she was alone in the dark with a ghost, but not frightened of him at all.

After a long, long time she noticed that the wind seemed to be dropping at last, and a little gray light could be seen coming in from outside. It seemed to have been a few minutes since they had had to push the boat free of the sand.

“I think you might be safe now, Miss Emma,” said Winston. His voice had a funny echoing quality, because Emma’s ears were still ringing from the noise of the gale.

“Let’s stand up, and lift the boat with us,” said Emma. “That way we can see what’s going on without getting sand blown in our eyes.”

So they stood together, and in the gray light of dawn saw that they were still standing in the oasis of dune grass and blackberry bushes. But it was not in a valley anymore; it was on the edge of a steep-sided bluff of sand.

Suddenly the wind came blustering straight at them. It plucked the boat off their shoulders as though it weighed no more than a straw hat, and tumbled it away behind them, end over end, far away across the trackless waste of sand to the edge of the horizon.

But neither Emma nor Winston noticed.

They were staring in astonishment at what had appeared before them, rising from where the high dune had been. It was a palace of turrets and spires, verandahs and cupolas, scrollwork and gilded weathervanes. In some places it was five stories tall. It was the most beautiful building Emma had ever seen, and brightly burning lights above the fourth-floor balcony spelled out its name:

THE GRAND WENLOCKE