"Grunt, you old nuisance!" muttered Cap'n Ira bitterly. "You don't
even know what a dratted, useless thing you be, I swan!"
There was a depression in the field. When the heavy spring and fall
rains came the water ran down into this sink and stood, sometimes a
foot or two deep over several acres. In some past time of heavy
flood the water had washed out to the edge of the highland
overlooking the ocean beach. There it had crumbled the brink of the
Head away, the water gullying year after year a deeper and broader
channel, until now the slanting gutter began a hundred yards back
from the brink.
The recurrent downpours, aided by occasional landslips, had made a
slanting trough to the beach itself, which was all of two hundred
feet below the brink of Wreckers' Head. Many such water-worn gullies
are to be found along the face of the Cape headlands, up which the
fishermen and seaweed gatherers freight their cargoes from the
shore. There was no wheel track here; merely a trough of sliding
sand, treacherous under foot and almost continuously in motion. As
the gully progressed seaward, the banks on either hand became more
than forty feet high, the trough itself being scarcely half as wide.
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