"He's got his wits about him-an' he had t' go-fur the supper dishes."

A change, unnoticed by the boy, came over the bos'n's face. He thought deeply for a minute, and then a half-smile quivered at his thick lips and was gone.

"Well, we kin get the skiff ready an' hope fur the best. Are ye anyways acquainted with her position? Myself, I ain't much on reckonin' an' never was. Is they any chance of us makin' a landfall in that skiff?"

"There is. Cape Sable 's less than twenty mile I seen it this evenin' before the mist set in. They 's a dory compass in the storeroom."

"What's the course to Cape Sable?" Hamlin spoke indifferently. The answer was on Ban's lips; but a startling possibility made him shut them. Then he considered, and spoke.

made the boy carry the compass, cautioning him again against any noise. They stopped at the galley while Hamlin picked up a tin of biscuit and a jug of water. Then, locked together, they climbed stumblingly to the deck. Dutchy stared at them in terror. "Come ahead, Dutchy, we 're a-goin' t' leave," Hamlin whispered gruffly. "Lash that there wheel just as she lays, so the old hooker 'll hang right to her course. There! Don't make no noise. I 'm cap'n; this thing 's our pilot. Quick, now, haul in that there painter. Now jump aboard-easy. Take this gear an' stow it outen the way. Move quickly! An' get in, ye! No ye don't! I've got ye an' I means t' hold ye. Yer wise mate kin just have a little cruise with M'Guire an' Manuel alone.

"Now take them oars, Dutchy, an' row like the skipper himself was on yer bloomin' heels till we gets out of ear-shot an' I kin drop this. Easy don't let them thole-pins grunt. Here we goes!"

The shadow of the Laughing Lass merged with the night.

Somewhat used, by this time, to that merciless grip behind his ears, Ban had spurred his brain to think. He sickened with shame at this desertion. His own freedom meant nothing to him now. Life had not brought him many friends; but he had said in pride that he had never doublecrossed a pal. Now what? It would look as if he had deliberately sent Rick below and slipped off, with the other sneaks.

a

Yet a glimmer of hope cheered him wild notion, but no wilder than his desperate position warranted. He cast about for others decided it was the only chance.

The two men, most likely, would row those twenty miles, while he sat in the stern and kept them on the course. It would take them about four hours, say until twelvethirty. Would Hamlin care what happened when they reached the shore? Could he, Ban, not row the distance back alone and reach the ship before dawn? Could he?

It was a wild chance. But Ban Hoag, with that vise still locked around his neck, determined to take it. The boy had not the slightest inkling that he was attempting anything heroic. According to the creed he lived by, it was the only thing to do. And he thought, simply, of his chances for success.

It pleased him to imagine himself crawling aboard the schooner perhaps in the gray dawn-stealing down to Rick's bunk-finding him racked with despair-hustling him

off. It eased the shame that filled his heart. But Hamlin's voice broke in: "Pass that compass aft! Now, you, what's the course?"

CHAPTER XVIII

ABOARD THE SKIFF

"HAVE ye got any matches?"

It was Hamlin's voice and it rasped. From the arrogance of its tone, one would have supposed that Ban Hoag had been given leisure hours for outfitting and minute inspection.

"No."

"Well how in the name of Lucifer are we a-goin' t' read the compass then?"

"You launched this trip, Hamlin. I was goin' t' take a lantern."

A mutter answered him. Gabe and Dutchy searched their clothes-produced, at length, eight matches and a broken tip. These the bos'n handed to Hoag, bidding him guard them with his life. The two men took their places at the oars, and Ban struck the first match.

Shielding it tenderly with his hands, he bent over the little wooden box between his knees and directed them to the course. So they started off, the boy huddled over his compass in the stern, Gabe Hamlin facing him on the after thwart, Dutchy in the bow.

The match burned down to his fingers; Ban was forced to drop it. Doubt had assailed him at this new development. Would this mean delay? He noticed with relief, however, that there was a little wind— enough, he thought, to guide them between periods of match-striking and certainty.

But it was not long after the darkness shut them in again that Dutchy began insisting in querulous tones that they had turned. At first the bos'n silenced him with a snarl; but when the little gray man persisted, Hamlin ordered the second match struck.

It may have been pure luck, but Ban found the needle exactly on the course, westnorthwest half west. That cheered them. And Gabe sneered at the man behind him.

They rowed on, then, in silence. Ban could still feel that light easterly puffing in over her starboard quarter-could still see, just beyond the gunwale, the little ranks of waves whose angle told him they were headed for the land. Otherwise, the whole world was a black, abysmal void, in which the only sound was the muffled grunt of the

There was no use in going on. They would much better wait for the daylight. Rowing without a compass, they were just as likely to head for mid-Atlantic as Cape Sable. The bos'n made this clear in his usual language and sprawled in the stern to sleep. Dutchy breathed a sigh of relief at cessation from present labor, mingled with anxiety for the future, as he curled up in the bow. And Ban Hoag was left on his after thwart facing the bleakness of absolute despair.

To them, this wait meant nothing but a passing annoyance their ready snores showed that. They were well out of an uncomfortable situation. There was no wind to blow them out to sea. They were somewhere within twenty miles of land, which they were almost sure of reaching when day came. If it took them a day or two to make it, say that they encountered head winds, for instance,-why, they had food and water to last them that time and longer. They could sleep with hardly a care.

And they did. But for him, for Ban Hoag, this was very bitter medicine. He knew now that something more than his shame urged him to return for Rick. From the beginning, he had felt a keen attraction in the English boy, who was so different from the wharf-rats and wastrels of his acquaintance. And he respected Rick's training, the home he himself had missed. Homeless himself, he could sympathize the more warmly with the boy who, having a white house somewhere "on High Street," and a waiting mother, was still forced by grotesque circumstance to seek refuge in the Laughing Lass.

And he had left Rick to his fate. That thought returned, wherever his mind wandered. He had blundered irretrievably in sending Rick to the after cabin. Rick would call him traitor-and that would be the word. If Rick went to prison,-or-worse, he, Hoag, would be solely responsible.

The boy's frame shook suddenly with dry, racking sobs. He had not meant to doublecross a friend-Rick of all others. It was hard, this world that gave nothing but knocks and punches. It was like the farmer in Vermont: it forced you into some error that you could hardly help, and then it smashed you.

"Shut up that sniveling, ye whelp, an' go t' sleep!" said Hamlin. It smashed you—

HOURS later the boy was still sitting as the bos'n's words had found him. He was still

staring into the immensity of the night, but a sort of peace was flooding slowly into his heart. For in the hour of his blackest misery he had turned, in a paroxysm of incoherent pleading, to One who watches over sufferers. And his cry had been answered with a nameless hope, an unreasoning breath of courage. A vague sense of grayness lay low on the black horizon, showing the limitless expanses of the sea. The stillness seemed like a soft gray blanket that shut out everything evil. Its peace was as the sacredness of a cathedral, the mystic solemnity of virgin timber. Ban Hoag shivered with a thrill of awe.

He could see Hamlin now, lying there at his feet, the heavy, beefy face of the man strangely passive, the mouth open. And out on the horizon a black smudge of smoke stood out, smeared against the dawn.

A ship-a big freighter coming from the east. Hoag delighted in the part she played in his picture; his numb senses hardly took her in beyond that fact. She had nothing to do with the peace in his soul; she was just a ship on her way from somewhere to somewhere else. He gazed at her, mildly curious, a little indifferent. She came on, a tenthousand tonner, low in the water, but still wonderfully majestic. White foam spread away from her mighty nose; a dot of red was the Union Jack on her poop.

And then Ban Hoag was astonished. The ship was looming near, and her speed slackened; she stopped. Of course the skiff had been seen from her bridge. They were derelicts; the ship would pick them up.

Hoag was again peaceful. He heard the clatter of boat falls, and all the confused murmur of a big vessel at sea. Again mildly curious, to see how this thing would be worked, he watched her silently.

He noticed the ship's night-lights. They looked unnatural in the dawn. The red light on her port side had been cut off when she turned. But the starboard light shone wanly, like a dying green eye. It was oddly placed. Most lights are fixed on the forward corners of the bridge. This one was aft.

CHAPTER XIX

IN COMMAND

THE skiff was gone!

But the perfidy of Hoag-what else could it be?-shrank momentarily before immediate and crushing danger. Behind him, Rick heard a wild stampede, the crash of