The Trey o' Hearts Part 1

THE TREY O' HEARTS

CHAPTER I
The Message of the Rose

LAPPED deep in the leather-bound luxury of an ample lounge-chair, walled apart from the world by the portentous silences and venerable solitude of the library of London's most exclusive club, Mr. Alan Law sprawled (largely on the nape of his neck), and, squinting discontentedly down his nose, plotted in furtherance of his own selfish ends.

He was exhaustively bored.

He had every legitimate reason to be bored. He had squeezed the orange of amusement dry and had nothing else to do but be bored. And this was England, this was June, this was his twenty-seventh summer; a combination of circumstances so alluring that with almost any other right-minded man it would have proved resistless.

He was, outwardly, a very ordinary person; that is to say, normally sane and good looking, well mannered, well cared for, well dressed. In other respects ​his was a singular personality. Since childhood he had worked hard, for no good reason that he could see, at learning his duty (and pleasure) in that state of life into which it had pleased God, to call him—but he had yet to earn an honest penny. He was master of a dozen-odd arts and crafts which had thus far rewarded him with nothing but ennui. He possessed and maintained in prime condition the body of an athlete, which served him to no particular end. He knew more about most things, from cabbages to kings, than did ninety-nine out of every hundred denizens of his world, but he didn't know how to avoid boredom. The sum of his wisdom on this subject was to the effect that ennui was inescapable; being good was frightfully wearing on one; misbehaving was worse.

Normally, Mr. Law did behave himself; he was made of the stuff that riches cannot spoil. Left to himself, he would far rather stand at the wheel of a motor boat than beside that of a roulette layout; he preferred playing polo to playing the ponies; hitting the high spots along Montmartre was less amusing, in his esteem, than sailing comfortably over them at an altitude of several thousand feet; while it was never his notion of fun to gulp bromo seltzer as an antidote for last night, and then cocktails to counteract the antidote.

But there were times when it was strongly borne ​in upon him that he must either break out in some unique and spontaneous manner or blow up. At such times history was apt to be manufactured in bulk. And this—this day of an English June—was one of those times. Mr. Queux was uneasily aware of the unrest simmering within him; very much, no doubt, as Vesuvius is periodically conscious of its divine discontent.

His chair stood by an open window, below which lay an old English garden in full flower, the property of the club and its boast. Through the window a half-hearted breeze wafted gusts of air soporific and heavy with the breath of roses.

Mr. Law drank deep of it, and in spite of his spiritual unrest, sighed slightly and shut his eyes.

An unspoken word troubled the deeps of his consciousness, so that old memories stirred and struggled to its surface. The word was "Rose," and for the time seemed to be the name neither of a woman nor a flower, but oddly of both, as though the two things were one.

He wondered idly why this was so until his mental vision, bridging the gap of a year, conjured up the picture of a lithe, sweet silhouette in white, with red roses at her belt, posed on a terrace of the Riviera against the burning Mediterranean blue.

Mr. Law was dully conscious that he ought to be ​sorry about something. But he was really very drowsy indeed. And so he fell quietly asleep.

The clock was striking four when he awoke, and before closing his eyes he had noticed that its hands indicated ten minutes to four. So he could not have slept long, if quite long enough to dream of a girl in white, with red roses at her belt, waiting for him on a pierhead in New York harbour.

And he came to smiling a gentle smile that slowly as consciousness cleared gave place to an impatient frown due to the reminder that he was to all intents an outlaw from America, and then by a look of downright bewilderment, due in turn to realization of a minor miracle that had come to pass while he dreamed.

For some few seconds Alan rested as he was, incredulously regarding the rose which had materialized so mysteriously upon the little table at his elbow. He was sure it had not been there when he closed his eyes, and almost as sure that it was not real. What right, indeed, had a red rose to trespass upon the solidly respectable and imaginative precincts of a British club library? Beyond reasonable doubt it was nothing more or less than the figment of a supersentimentalized imagination worked upon by the magic fragrance of the rose garden.

Then of a sudden he sat bolt upright.

In defiance of the injunction that glared at him ​from every reading table in the room—letters of gold on a black ground, neatly framed:

SILENCE!

Mr. Law announced with the emphasis of absolute conviction:

"Well, I'm damned!"

He touched the rose. It was real beyond all question; a warm red rose, fresh plucked. When impulsively he took it by the stem, he discovered a most indisputable thorn—which did service for the traditional pinch.

Thus persuaded that he was not still dreaming, Mr. Law jumped up from his chair and glared suspiciously round the room. A practical joke in that solemn atmosphere was a thing unthinkable; still, there was the rose.

But the room was empty aside from himself and the rose.

Impulsively he struck a call-bell—and repented, haunted by the fear of making himself ridiculous. It was inconceivable that he should demand of the waiter then approaching, "Who, while I slept, made me a present of this rose?"

The waiter entered to find the member leaning nonchalantly against the table, drawing on his gloves.

"You rang, sir?"

​"I did. Ah—waiter, I've been asleep, you know."

"Thank you, sir."

"Only a minute or two, of course."

"Quite so, sir."

"I wish to know if anybody entered this room while I was asleep."

"I couldn't say, sir—unless it might 'ave been Mr. Marrophat. 'E's the only other gentleman on this floor of the club-'ouse at present, sir."

"Marrophat? But I don't know him!"

"Thank you, sir."

"Still ... where is he?"

"In the writing-room, sir."

"Thanks."

"Thank you, sir."

"Marrophat? No fear!" Mr. Law assured himself as the waiter left the room.

On the other hand, roses are not introduced into London's most exclusive clubs without some human sponsor.

On his way out Law glanced through the door of the writing-room, and was confirmed in his incredulity. Mr. Marrophat, stodgily rounded over a desk in the corner, was the incarnate genius of superfatted British dignity. Impossible to credit him with anything resembling a sense of humour—or any such spirit of romantic mischief as might prompt one to distribute roses to one's fellow club members.

​Perplexed, Alan fled the club, pausing by force of habit only long enough to consult the letter-rack and annex an envelope he found there addressed to him.

It was a white envelope of good quality. The address was typewritten, the stamp English, with a London postmark, half illegible.

Mr. Law tore the envelope open in an absent-minded fashion, and started as if stung. The inclosure was a simple playing card—a Trey of Hearts!

In the writing-room Mr. Marrophat continued to compose. The mental exertion caused him to breathe rather heavily. His colourless thick lips were compressed as if to restrain his tongue from aping the antics of his pen. His starting eyes followed the ink scratches on the telegraph blank with a look of mildly anguished surprise.

In point of fact, he wasn't writing; he was laboriously printing the following words:

"Senex, New York—Rose uttered 3:58 p. m. Trey followed. A. much disturbed. ⁠ M. P. T."

When he had finished, Mr. Marrophat waved the blank to and fro until the ink was dry. This was not for want of a blotter, but because blotters have been known to reveal secrets when read in a mirror.

​Nor was it because the club lacked servants that Mr. Marrophat presently got up, folded his cable message, waddled forth, and proceeded to commit it to the nearest office with his own trustworthy fat hands.

As for Alan Law, he wandered down Pall Mall in a state of daze; he went toward Trafalgar Square. He didn't know where he was going, or even that he was on his way, and he didn't care. For all that, no one who chanced to observe him would have dreamed that he was preoccupied with questioning his own mental integrity; but the hypothetical observer would have shared his misgiving had he suspected that Mr. Law was wearing a rose inside his top hat, to say nothing of a three spot of hearts in the breast pocket of his admirable morning coat.

He could, of course, read quite well the message of the rose. He would not soon forget that year-old parting with his Rose of the Riviera:

"You say you love me but may not marry me—and we must never see each other again. Then promise this, that if ever you change your mind, you'll send for me."

And her promise: "I will send you a rose."

But a year had lapsed with never a sign from her, so that he had grown accustomed to the unflattering belief that she had forgotten him.

And now the sign had come—but in a fashion so ​strange that he hesitated to accept it. It wouldn't do to jump at conclusions and make one's self ridiculous. Very probably it hadn't come from her at all, but was just an everyday coincidence.

But there was that Trey of Hearts! Now what the deuce did the Trey of Hearts mean?

Now in heraldry the word Trine signifies a group of three. And the Trey of Hearts is a group of three. And the surname of that Rose of his heart's desire was Trine.

Was the card then simply her way of fixing beyond question the identity of the sender of the rose?

Alan ambled aimlessly into Cockspur Street, and of a sudden found himself at a dead halt, transfixed by a poster in one of the show windows.

The poster advertised the newest steamship in the trans-Atlantic service, and the artist had seen fit to delineate his subject at the moment of drawing away from a pierhead in the foreground, on which pierhead a young woman was shown waving a farewell handkerchief—a lithe, sweet silhouette in white with red roses at her belt posed against a sea of burning blue.

Mr. Law drew an incredulous, lemon-gloved hand across his bewildered forehead.

"Three times in the same place in thirty minutes!" he muttered blankly, "There's something uncanny about this … If life itself were not a riddle ​without a reading—I'd begin to believe in the supernatural! As it is——"

When he entered his rooms that evening to dress for dinner it was to find an American Beauty rose ornamenting his dressing-table, pinned to a Trey of Hearts.

Interrogated, his valet deposed ignorance of the matter.

When Alan returned from dinner and the theatre, it was to find a solitary rose reposing with blushing effrontery upon his pillow. The inevitable Trey of Hearts, it appeared, had crawled in between the covers.

That made three of each.

Mr. Law sat down and thought. Then he summoned his valet—and discharged him.

"The Lord," he said, "may love a liar. But I'm human. Here's a month's wages. Clear out of this in three minutes. ..."

When morning came, London had lost Alan Law. No man—nor any woman—had received warning of his disappearance. He was simply vanished from English ken.

 

CHAPTER II
The Sign of the Three

OUT of doors, high noon, spring, the clamorous life of New York swift running through its brilliant streets.

Within doors, neither sound nor sunbeam disturbed a perennial quiet that was yet not peace.

The room was like a well of night, the haunt of shadows and sinister silences. Heavy hangings darkened its windows and masked its doors, a carpet of velvet muffled its floor, bookcases lined its walls. From the topmost shelves pale sculptured masks peered down, incarnadined by the dim glow from a solitary light that burned in that darkness like a smouldering ember.

The electric bulb of ruby glass was focussed upon a leather-bound desk-blotter on a black desk whose farther edges blended with the shadows.

Little was visible beyond the radius of that light and the figure of an old man that brooded over it, motionless in a great leather-bound chair.

His hair was as white as his heart was black; his nose was aquiline, finely chiselled, his cheek-bones ​high and sharp. His mouth resembled a steel trap; while his forehead shelved back sharply from ragged black brows that shadowed eyes like live coals.

He was clothed in a black dressing-gown, and from the thighs down was covered by a woollen rug. He stared unblinking at the crimson blotter: a man seven eighths dead, completely paralyzed but for his head and his left arm.

A figure of savage patience he sat waiting—for years on end, for so long that those who knew him had well-nigh forgotten that Seneca Trine once had been as vital a creature as ever lived.

Presently a faint clicking disturbed the stillness. Seneca Trine had put forth his left hand and touched a button embedded in the desk. Something else clicked—this time a latch. There was the faint sound of a closing door, the hangings rustled, and a smallish man in black stole into the light, paused beside the desk, and waited for leave to speak.

The voice of Trine rang like a bell in the silence, a weirdly deep and sonorous voice to issue from that wasted frame.

"Well?"

"A telegram, sir—from England."

"Give it me!"

The old man seized the sheet of yellow paper, scanned it hungrily, and crushed it with a gesture of ​uncontrollable emotion. His voice rang with exultation when next he spoke:

"Send my daughter Judith here!"

The servant disappeared, and two minutes later a young woman in street dress was admitted to the chamber of the shadows. She went directly to her father, bent over and touched her lips to his forehead.

He did not speak, but her quick ears caught the rustle of the paper crushed anew in his grasp, and she experienced an intuition of something momentous impending.

"You sent for me, father?"

He replied brusquely: "Sit down."

She found a chair and settled herself in it.

"Now turn the light upon your face."

The red glow lighted up a face of exquisite beauty, an eager, passionate face mirroring the spirit of quenchless youth, and her father nodded slightly as if with satisfaction.

"Judith—tell me—what day is this?"

"My birthday. I am twenty-one."

"And your sister's birthday? Rose, too, is twenty-one."

A slight frown clouded Judith's face; but she replied quietly: "Yes."

"You could have forgotten that," the old man pursued almost mockingly. "Do you dislike your twin-sister so intensely?"

​The girl's voice trembled. "You know," she said, "I hate and despise her."

"Why?"

"We have nothing in common—beyond parentage and this abominable resemblance. Our natures differ as light from darkness."

"And which would you say was—light?"

"Hardly my own: I'm no hypocrite. Rose is everything that they tell me my mother was, while I"—the girl smiled strangely—"I think—I am more your daughter than my mother's."

A nod of the white head confirmed the suggestion. "It is true. I have watched you closely, Judith. Before I was brought to this"—the wasted hand made a significant gesture—"I was a man of strong passions. … Your mother never loved, but rather feared, me. And Rose is the mirror of her mother's nature: gentle, unselfish, sympathetic. But you, Judith, you are like a second self to me."

An accent of satisfaction was in his voice. The girl waited, tensely expectant.

"Then, if I were to ask a service of you that might injuriously affect the happiness of your sister——"

The girl laughed briefly: "Only ask it!"

"And how far would you go to do my will——"

"Where would you stop in the service of one you loved?"

Seneca Trine permitted himself an odd mirthless ​

TRINE SUSPECTED HIS WIFE. OF WHAT, HE COULD NOT TELL.

​

ON THIS DAY, LAW, SR., WENT DOWN TO FINANCIAL DEFEAT

​chuckle, "I know," he said, "I know." And after a brief pause: "Rose is in love," he announced obliquely.

The girl half-started from her chair, but with visible effort controlled herself.

"Oh, I know—I know!" the father continued. "I am a prisoner of this living tomb; but all things I should know—somehow—in time—I come to know."

"It's true—that Englishman last year—what's his name?—Law, Alan Law."

"In the main," the father corrected, "you are right. Only he's not English. His father was Wellington Law, the banker."

She knew better than to interrupt, but her seeming patience was belied by the whitening knuckles of a hand that lay within the little pool of blood-red light.

Presently the deep voice rolled on: "Law and I were once friends; then—we loved one woman, your mother. I won her—all but her heart: too late she realized it was Law she loved. He never forgave me, nor I him. Though he married another woman, still he held from me the love of my wife. I could not sleep for hating him—and he was no better off. Each sought the other's ruin; it came to be an open duel between us in Wall Street. One of us had to fail—and I held the stronger hand. The night before the day that was to have seen my triumph I walked in Central Park, as was my habit, to tire my body ​so that my brain might sleep. I was struck by a motor-car, picked up insensible—and lived only to be what I am. Law triumphed in the Street while I lay helpless; only a remnant of my fortune remained to me. Then his chauffeur, discharged, came to me and sold me the truth; it was Law's car with Law at the wheel that had struck me down—a deliberate attempt at assassination. I sent Law word that I meant to have a life for a life. For what was I better than dead? I promised him that, should he escape, I would have the life of his son. He knew I meant it, and sent his wife and son abroad. Then he died suddenly—I believe from fear of me."

Trine smiled. "I had made his life a reign of terror. Ever so often I would send him—mysteriously always—a Trey of Hearts: it was my death-sign for him. Every time he received a Trey of Hearts, within twenty-four hours an attempt of some sort would be made upon his life. The strain broke down his nerve. …

"Then I turned my attention to the son, but the Law millions mocked my efforts; their alliance with the Rothschilds placed mother and son under the protection of every secret police in Europe, but they dared not come home. At length I realized that I must wait game. I needed three things: more money; to bring Alan Law back to America; and an incorruptible agent. I ceased to persecute mother ​and son, and by careful speculations repaired my fortunes. In Rose I had the lure to draw the boy back to America; in you, the one person I could trust.

"I sent Rose abroad under an assumed surname and arranged that she should meet Law. They fell in love at sight. Then I wrote her that the man she had chosen was the son of him who had murdered all of me but my brain. It fell out as I foresaw: she broke off with Law without telling him the truth. You can imagine the scene—passionate renunciation—pledges of constancy—the arrangement of a secret code whereby, when she needed him, she would send him a single rose—the birth of a great romance!"

The old man laughed sardonically. "Well … the rose has been sent; Law is already homeward bound; my agents are watching his every step. The rest is in your hands."

The girl bent forward, her eyes aflame in a pallid face.

"What is it you want of me?" she asked in a vibrant voice.

"Bring Alan Law to me. Dead or alive, bring him to me. But alive, if you can compass it: I wish to see him die."

The hand of youth grasped the icy hand of death-in-life.

"I will bring him," Judith swore. "Dead or alive, you shall have him here."

CHAPTER III
The Trail of Treachery

BUT young Mr. Law was sole agent of his own evanishment. The reason for his life in exile was well known to him, if largely a matter of indifference since his friendships had taken root in English soil. The message of the Rose he understood perfectly; but the hidden meaning of the Trey of Hearts so perplexed him that before leaving London he dispatched a cablegram to Digby, his confidential agent in New York:

"What do you know about the Trey of Hearts? Answer immediately."

Digby's answer forestalled Alan's arrival in Liverpool:

"Trey of Hearts was Trine's death-sign for your father. For God's sake keep away from America."

But Alan had more than once visited America incognito and unknown to Seneca Trine, and had ​confidence in his ability successfully to repeat the adventure—via a route of his own selection.

Eight days out of London, a second-class passenger newly landed from one of the C.-P. steamships, he walked the streets of Quebec, and dropped out of sight between dark and dawn, to turn up in the Canadian hamlet of Baie St. Paul, apparently a tenderfoot American woods-traveller chaperoned by a taciturn Indian guide.

Crossing the St. Lawrence by night, the two struck off into the hinterland of the Notre Dame range, followed the Riviere Quelle to its headwaters, and then crossed the Maine border.

On the second noon thereafter, trail-worn and weary, the two paused on a ridge-pole of the wilderness up back of the Allagash country, and made their midday meal in a silence which, if normal in the Indian, was one of deep misgiving on Alan's part.

Continually his gaze questioned the northern skies that lowered portentously, foul with the smoke of a county-wide conflagration that threatened unless soon checked to lay waste all northern Maine bone-dry with drought.

And the fires were making southward far faster than man might hope to travel through that grim and stubborn land. Even as he stared, Alan saw fresh columns of dun-coloured smoke spring up as ​the flames, spurred by a freshening wind, made league-consuming strides.

Anxiously he consulted the Indian. But his questions gained Alan little comfort from Jacob, who said that rain alone could stop the flames. After recommending forced marches to bring them by to-morrow's noon to the spot he called Spirit Lake, where canoes might be found to aid their flight, the Indian withdrew into sullen reserve.

They travelled far and fast before sundown, then again paused for food and rest. As Jacob set about preparing the meal, Alan stumbled off to whip the little trail-side stream for trout.

Perhaps a hundred yards upstream, the back-lash of a careless cast hooked the State of Maine. Too tired even to remember the appropriate words, Alan scrambled ashore, forced through the undergrowth that masked the trail, found his fly, set the State of Maine free, and swinging on his heel brought up standing, transfixed by the discovery of a rectangle of white pasteboard fixed to the trunk of a sapling: a Trey of Hearts, of which each pip had been neatly punctured by a .22 calibre bullet.

Nor had it been long there: when Alan scrutinized it he found the card innocent of weather-stains, the pin unrusted that held it, the wounds in the sapling raw and damp.

He carried it back to camp, meaning to consult ​the guide, but on second thought reconsidered. It was not likely that the Indian had overlooked the inevitable traces of human neighbours that must have been apparent to his woods-sharpened wits. So Alan waited for him to speak, and meantime determined to watch him narrowly, though no other suspicious circumstance had marked their association. It might turn out to be simply chance which had thrown that sinister card in his path.

The first half of the night was devoted to relentless progress southward. There could be no more question as to the need for urgent haste: overhead the north wind muttered; thin veils of smoke drifted through the forest, and ever the curtained heavens glared with reflected fires.

By midnight Alan had passed the limit of his endurance. Though Jacob declared that Spirit Lake was now only six hours distant, as far as concerned Alan he might have said six hundred. They camped in perfunctory fashion. His blanket once unrolled, Alan dropped upon it like one drugged.

The sun was high when he awakened and sat up, wondering what had come over the Indian to let him sleep so late. This was soon made clear. Jacob had absconded, leaving Alan barely food enough for a cold breakfast.

Overnight the fire had made tremendous gains. The nearness of his peril dwarfed the treachery of the ​Indian. Alan delayed long enough to swallow a few mouthfuls of raw food, gulped water from a spring, and set out at a dog-trot on the trail to Spirit Lake.

For hours he blundered on, holding to the trail mainly by instinct—the roaring of the flames ever more loud and ominous, the cloud of smoke ever more dense, the heat moment by moment more intense.

Finally he staggered into a little clearing, tripped over some obstacle, and plunged headlong, so bewildered that he could not have said whether he was tripped or thrown. As he fell a heavy body landed on his back and crushed him savagely to earth.

In less than a minute he was overcome, his wrists hitched together, his ankles bound. When his vision cleared he discovered Jacob squatting on his heels and regarding him with a face as immobile as the bronze it resembled.

Beyond, a woman in a man's hunting costume stood eying the captive as narrowly as the Indian, but with a countenance that seemed exultantly aglow over his downfall.

But for that look he could have believed the face that which had brought him overseas: feature for feature, she counterfeited the woman he loved; only those eyes, aflame with their look of inhuman ruthlessness, denied that the two were one.

He sought to speak. The breath rustled in his throat like wind whispering among dead leaves.

​

THEY HAD CRUSHED THEIR MAN … THEIR FILTHY WORK WAS DONE

​

THE FACE IN THE LOCKET BROUGHT MEMORIES OF WONDERFUL DAYS NOW PAST.

​

Thrusting the Indian aside, the woman knelt by Alan's head.

"So!" she said sweetly. "So, Mr. Alan Law!"

He made no effort to reply; the thought in his mind was that in those eyes was less of madness than of inhumanity; that this was less a creature bereft of reason than one brought into the world without a soul.

"No," she said, smiling cruelly, "I am not your Rose. But I am her sister Judith, born in the same hour, daughter of—— Can you guess whose daughter?"

He shook his head.

"You thought it a girl’s romantic nonsense that made Rose refuse you because of a secret barrier between you! But see this!” She held a card before his eyes. "You know it? The Trey of Hearts—the symbol of Trine—Trine, your father's enemy, and yours, and—Rose's father and mine!"

A gust of wind like a furnace blast swept the glade. The woman sprang up, glanced over-shoulder into the forest, and signed to the Indian.

"In ten minutes," she said, "these woods will be your funeral pyre."

Jacob picked Alan up and strode into the forest. Ten feet from the clearing he dropped the helpless man upon a bed of dry logs and branches.

Then, with a single movement, he disappeared.

wer o' the Flame

OOVERHEAD through the foliage, a sky was visible whose ebon darkness called to mind a thundercloud. Beneath it veils and whorls of smoke fled athwart the wreck. The heat was nearly intolerable; the voice of the fire was loud—snappings and cracklings and sharp detonations making an embroidery of sound upon a texture of sustained roaring like that of surf.

A heavy crashing made Alan turn his head, and he saw a terrified bear break cover and plunge on into the farther thickets.

Two minutes had passed of the ten when a sharp crackling brought him suddenly to a sitting position, to find that the Indian had touched a match to the pyre before departing. At Alan's feet the twigs were blazing merrily.

It would have been easy to snatch his limbs away, but another thought was in his mind: he did not move more than to strain his feet apart as far as their bonds permitted. He was conscious of scorching heat even through his cowhide hunting boots; ​but a minute sufficed: within its span a tongue of flame licked up, wrapped itself round the hempen cord, and ate it through. Immediately Alan kicked his feet free and crawled from the pyre.

As for his hands—Alan's hunting-knife was still in its sheath belted to the small of his back. Tearing at the belt with his hampered fingers, he contrived to shift it round within comparatively easy reach. Withdrawing and conveying the blade to his mouth, he gripped it between his teeth and severed the cords round his wrists.

Already the glare was silhouetting the trees not a hundred yards away. Before Alan could turn and run he saw the flames bridge fifty yards at a bound and set a dead pine blazing.

And then he was pelting like a madman across the clearing. Presently the trail branched right and left; Alan darted to the left at a venture, and soon broke from the forest to the shore of a lake, within few hundred feet of the dam that choked its outlet—a substantial dam, well-banked and timbered, through whose spillway a heavy volume of water cascaded with a roar.

A glance showed Alan that his only way of escape was via the dam, and that there was a canoe at mid-lake bearing to the farther shore Judith Trine and the Indian. Suddenly Jacob turned his head sharply and dropped the paddle. The next instant a bullet ​from a Winchester .30 kicked up the pebbles a few feet in advance of Alan.

He quickened his pace; the next bullet fell closer, while the third actually bit the earth beneath his running feet as he gained the dam. Exasperated, he pulled up, whipped out his pistol and fired without aim. And he noted that the distance between dam and canoe had lessened perceptibly, thanks to the strong current sucking through the spillway.

His shot flew wide, but instinctively his finger closed again upon the trigger, and coincident with the report he saw the paddle in the bow of the canoe snap in twain, its blade falling overboard. Then the Indian fired again, his bullet droning past Alan's ear. As he fired in response Jacob started, dropped his rifle into the lake, clawed at his throat, and crumpled up in the bow of the canoe.

Alan turned and ran along the dam toward two heavy timbers that bridged the spillway.

Then a glance aside brought him up with a thrill of horror: the suck of the overflow had drawn the canoe within a hundred yards of the spillway. The dead Indian in its bow, the living woman helpless in its stern, it swept onward to destruction.

A moment later Alan found himself at the brink of the spillway, staring down into a chasm thirty feet in depth, wherein the cascade broke upon a huddle of jagged boulders.

​His next actions were unpremeditated. He ran out upon the bridge, threw himself down upon the innermost timber, and calculated the drop to the glassy brink immediately below—not less than a fathom. And the canoe was now within a hundred feet.

A swift glance gauged its course: Alan turned, dropped his legs in the space between the timbers, and let his body fall backward, arms extended, and swung braced by his feet beneath the outer timber.

He was aware of the canoe hurtling onward, its sharp prow aimed directly for his head. In an instant hands closed around his wrists, a tremulous weight tore at his arms, and with an effort of inconceivable difficulty he began to lift the woman up out of the foaming jaws of death.

Somehow that impossible feat was achieved, somehow the woman gained a hold upon his body and contrived to clamber over him to the timbers, and somehow he in turn pulled himself up to safety. Later he became aware that the woman had crawled to safety on the farther shore; he pulled himself together and imitated her example. Then he discovered the face of Judith Trine close to his, and he heard her voice, barely audible above the voices of conflagration and cascade:

"You fool! Why did you save me? I tell you, I have sworn your death——"

​The grotesqueness of it all broke upon him and he laughed hysterically, waving her aside.

"Oh, go to the devil!" he cackled insanely. …

Darkness followed. A flash of lightning seemed to flame between them and he lapsed into unconsciousness. …

When he roused, it was with a shiver. Rain was falling in torrents. Across the lake clouds of steam enveloped the fires that fainted beneath the deluge. A hissing noise filled the world above the roaring of the spillway.

He was alone.

But in his hand he found—a rose.

CHAPTER V
The Hunted Man

THE day was hot and windless with an unclouded sky, and memories of the dreadful yesterday but deepened the sense of to-day's serenity.

In flooding sunlight the woodlands basked and steamed, and a great stillness brooded over all the wilderness. Long before any sound audible to human ears disturbed the noonday hush, a bobcat sunning on a log in a glade to which no trail led, pricked ears, rose, glanced over-shoulder with a snarl, and—of a sudden—was no more there.

Perhaps two minutes later a succession of remote crashings began to be heard, the sound made by some heavy body forcing a way through the underbrush. Soon a man broke into the clearing and reeled to a seat on the log, shuddering uncontrollably in all his limbs.

He was a young man and had been personable. Just now his face was crimson with congested blood and streaked with sweat and grime; his lips were cracked and swollen, his eyes haggard, his hands bleeding. Woods equipment he had none beyond a ​hunting-knife. All else had been consumed in the forest fire or stolen by his Indian guide.

Now the man was lost. After a night passed without a fire he had waked to discover the sun rising in the west and the rest of the universe sympathetically upside-down. Aimlessly, ever since, he had stumbled and blundered—possessed by a notion that he was dogged by furtive enemies—and within the last hour the puppet of blind, witless panic.

Even now, as he strove to calm himself and rest, the feeling that something was peering at him grew intolerably acute. He jumped up, flung himself frantically through the brush in pursuit of the something, and—found nothing.

With a great effort he pulled himself together and turned back to the clearing.

There, upon the log on which he had rested, he found—but refused to believe he saw—a playing card—a Trey of Hearts.

With a gesture of horror Alan Law fled the place.

Then a grinning half-breed guide stole like a shadow to the log, picked up and pocketed the card, and set out in tireless, catfooted pursuit.

An hour later, topping a ridge, Alan caught the music of clashing waters. Tortured by thirst, he began at once to descend in reckless haste. What was at first a gentle slope grew swiftly more ​

IN THAT HOUR TRINE SWORE AN AWFUL REVENGE AGAINST LAW.

​

JUDITH WAS THE PET OF HER FATHER.

​declivitous, bare of underbrush, and sparsely sown with small cedars.

The shelving moss-beds afforded uncertain footing, and the scanty cedar growth but small support. Alan came at headlong pace within sight of the eaves of a cliff, and precisely then the hillside seemed to slip from under him. His heels flourished in the air, his back thumped a bed of pebbles. He began to slide, grasped a puny little cedar which came away in his hand, and amid a shower of stones shot over the edge and down a drop of more than thirty feet. He was aware of the sun, a molten ball wheeling madly in the sky. Then dark waters closed over him.

He came up gasping, and struck out for something dark that rode the waters near at hand—a canoe. But his strength was spent. Within a stroke of an outstretched paddle he flung up a hand and went down.

Instantly one occupant of the canoe, a young and very beautiful woman in a man's hunting clothes, spoke a word of command, and, as her guide steadied the vessel with his paddle, rose carefully in her place and curved her lithe body over the bows, headforemost into the pool.

CHAPTER VI
The Haunting Woman

MR. LAW had endured even more than a weathered woodsman could have borne without suffering. Forty-eight hours of such heavy woods-walking as he had put in to escape the fire would have served to prostrate almost any man; add to this (ignoring a dozen other mental, nervous, and physical strains) the fact that he had been half-drowned. …. He experienced fever, delirium, then blank slumbers of exhaustion.

He awoke at night, unaware that thirty-six hours had passed since his fall. This last, however, and events that had gone before, he recalled with tolerable clearness. Other memories, more vague, of gentle hands, of a face by turns an angel's and a dear woman's, troubled him even less materially. He was sane enough to know he had been out of his head, and since it seemed he had been saved and cared for, he found no reason to quarrel with present circumstances.

With some difficulty, from a dry throat, he whispered: "Water …"

​In response he heard some one move over a creaking floor. A sulphur match spluttered. A candle caught fire, silhouetting—illusion, of course!—the figure of a woman. Water splashed. Water splashed noisily. Alan became aware of some one who stood at his side, one hand offering a glass, the other gently raising his head that he might drink.

Draining the glass, he breathed his thanks and sank back, retaining his grasp on the wrist of that unreal hand. The hallucination went so far as to say, in a woman's soft accents:

"You are better, Alan?"

He sighed incredulously: "Rose!"

The voice responded, "Yes!" Then the perfume of roses grew still more strong, and a miracle came to pass: for Mr. Law, who realized poignantly that all this was sheer nonsense, distinctly felt lips like velvet caress his forehead.

He closed his eyes, tightened his grasp on that hand of phantasy, and muttered.

The voice asked: "What is it, dear?"

He responded; "Delirium. … But I like it. … Let me rave!"

Then again he slept.

CHAPTER VII
Disclosures

IN A little office, in one of lower Manhattan's office-towers, a mouse-brown man sat over a big desk: a little man of big affairs, sole steward of one of America's most formidable fortunes.

At precisely the instant when Alan Law catapulted over the edge of a cliff in northern Maine the signal of the little man's telephone clicked, and, lifting receiver to ear, he nodded with a smile and said, "Ask her to come in at once, please." Jumping up, he placed a chair, the door opened, and a young woman entered.

The mouse-brown man bowed. "Miss Rose Trine?" he murmured.

The young woman returned his bow: "Mr. Digby?"

"You are kind to come in response to my—ah—unconventional invitation," said the little man. "Won't you—ah—sit down?"

She said, "Thank you," gravely, and took the chair he indicated.

"If you will permit me to say so," he said ​

IT WAS LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT.

​

ALAN FOUND HIMSELF LOVING THE DAUGHTER OF HIS ENEMY.

​diffidently, "now that one sees you, Miss Trine, it is quite comprehensible why my employer—ah—feels toward you as he does."

The girl flushed. "Mr. Law has told you——?"

"I am his nearest friend on this side, as well as his man of business. So I have ventured to request this—ah surreptitious appointment in order to—ah—take liberty of asking whether you have recently sent Alan a message."

"I have not communicated with Mr. Law in more than a year!"

"Precisely as I thought," Mr. Digby nodded. "None the less, Mr. Law not long since received what purported to be a message from you: In fact—a rose. I have the information over Mr. Law's signature—a letter received ten days ago—from Quebec."

"Alan in America!" the girl cried in distress.

"In response to—ah—the message of the rose."

"But I did not send it!"

"I felt sure of that," said Mr. Digby, watching her narrowly, "because of something that accompanied the rose, a playing card—a Trey of Hearts."

Her eyes were blank. "I must tell you, I see, that a Trey of Hearts invariably foresignalled an attempt on the life of Alan's father."

Her white lips stammered: "My father——?"

"That is why I sent for you," Mr. Digby pursued. "Alan's letter reached me within twenty-four hours ​of his arrival in Quebec, and detailed his scheme to enter the United States secretly—as he puts it, by way of northern Maine—and promised to advise by telegraph as soon as he reached Moosehead Lake. He should have wired me ere this. Frankly, I am anxious about the boy!"

"And I!" the girl exclaimed pitifully. "To think that he should be brought into such peril through me!"

"You can tell me nothing?"

"Nothing—as yet. I did not dream that the message of the rose was known to any but Alan and myself. I cannot understand!"

"I may tell you that your father maintains a very efficient corps of secret agents."

"You think he spied upon me?"

"I know he did. In the service of my employer I, too, employ agents of my own. Your father sent you to Europe for the sole purpose of having you meet Alan."

"Oh!" she protested. "But what earthly motive——"

"That Alan might be won back to America through you—and——"

There was no need to finish. The girl was visibly mustering her wits to cope with this emergency.

"I may depend on you," Mr. Digby suggested, "to advise me if——?"

​A fine spirit of resolve set her countenance aglow. "You may count on me for action on my part, if circumstances warrant it. I promised not to marry Alan—but not to stand by and see him sacrificed. Tell me how I may communicate secretly with you—and let me go as soon as possible!"

Within the hour Rose Trine stood before her father in that sombre room whose sinister colour-scheme of crimson and black was the true livery of the passion for vengeance that alone kept warm the embers of his deathlike life. Two hours ago she could not have denied him compassion; now she looked down upon him with cold eyes, hardening her heart. When at length he decided to speak, it was with a ring of hateful irony in his strangely sonorous voice.

"Rose, I am told you have been to-day guilty of an act of disloyalty."

She said coolly: "You had me spied upon."

"Naturally, I had you watched."

She dropped an impassive monosyllable: "Well?"

"You have visited the servant and friend of the man I hate—and you love."

She said, without expression: "Yes."

"Repeat what passed between you."

"I shall not, but on one condition."

"And that is——?"

​"Tell me whether it was you who sent the rose— and, where is Judith?"

"I shall tell you nothing. Repeat"—the voice rang resolutely—"repeat what Digby told you!"

The girl was silent for a long minute. Then his hand moved toward the row of buttons sunk in the top of his desk.

"I warn you I have ways to make you speak——"

With a quick movement the girl prisoned the bony wrist in her strong fingers. With her other hand she whipped open an upper drawer of the desk and took from it a revolver.

"On the contrary," she said quietly, "the time has passed when you could have me punished for disobedience. You will call nobody; if interrupted I shan't hesitate to defend myself. And now I shall find for myself what I wish to know."

For a moment he watched in silence as she bent over the desk, rummaging its drawers. Then with an infuriated gesture he began to curse her. …

She shuddered a little at the black oaths, but nothing could stay her in her purpose. He was breathless when she straightened up, studied intently for a moment a sheaf of papers, and thrust them into her hand-bag with the revolver. Then touching the push-button which released a secret door, she slipped from the room, and within another minute had made her way unseen from the house.

CHAPTER VIII
White Water

IN BROAD daylight Alan Law opened bewildered eyes to realize the substance of a dream come true. He lay upon a couch of balsam, in a corner of somebody's camp—a log structure, rudely furnished. His clothing lay upon a chair at his side.

He arose and dressed, exulting in his sense of renewed well-being, a prey to hints of an extraordinary appetite. There were evidences of a woman's recent presence: blankets neatly folded upon a second bed of aromatic balsam in the corner, a pair of dainty buckskin gauntlets depending from a nail in the wall, and, in an old preserve jar on the table, a single rose, warm and red, dew upon its petals!

There was fire in the cook-stove and things to cook, but despite his hunger Alan didn't stop for that. He rushed to the door, threw it open, and looked out. There was no living thing in sight.

The place was a table of level land some few acres in area, bounded on one hand, beneath the cliff from which he had dropped, by a river fat with recent rains; on the other by a second cliff of equal height. ​Near the camp, upon a strip of shelving beach, two canoes were drawn up. Dense thickets of pines, oaks, and balsam hedged in the clearing.

He was, it seemed, to be left to himself that day; when he had cooked and made way with an enormous breakfast, Alan found nothing better to do than to explore this pocket domain. He never wandered far from camp. He was indisposed to run any risk of not being at home to welcome the woman who had nursed him and then vanished, leaving him for souvenir only that rose (culled from a bush that some whim of chance had planted near the cabin door) and the memory of her lips. …

He feasted famously again at noon; whiled away several hours by fishing with rod and tackle found in the camp, and toward three o'clock lounged back to his aromatic couch for a nap.

The westering sun had thrown a shadow across the cove when he was awakened. Rose Trine was kneeling beside him, clutching his shoulders, calling him by name. He wasted no time discriminating between dream and reality, but gathered both into his arms. And for a moment she rested there unresisting, if sobbing quietly.

"What is it, dearest?" he questioned, kissing her tears away.

"To find you all right. … I was so afraid!"

​"Of what? Wasn't I all right when you left me here this morning?"

She looked strangely at him.

"I did not leave you here this morning, Alan. I wasn't here——"

"You were not——" he stammered. "Then who——?"

"Judith," she stated with conviction.

"Impossible! You don't understand."

The girl shook her head. "Yet I know Judith was here until this morning. I tell you I know! She passed us in a canoe a few hours ago while we watched in hiding. And one of her guides told mine she was here with you. She had sent him to South Portage for quinine. He stopped there to get drunk, and that's how my guide managed to worm the information from him."

"I don't understand." Alan passed a hand across his eyes.

The report of a rifle interrupted him. At this, clutching frantically at his arm, the girl drew him away toward the river.

"Oh, come!" she cried wildly. "There's no time——!"

"But why? What was that?"

"Judith is returning. We must escape the only way—by the river."

"The current is too strong."

​"But downstream—the current with us——"

"How about those rapids?"

"We must shoot them!"

"Can it be done?"

"It must be!"

He offered no further objection, but turned at once and launched one of the canoes. Rose took her place in the bow, paddle in hand; and Alan was about to step in astern when a shot sounded and a bullet kicked up turf within a dozen feet. A glance discovered two figures debouching into the clearing. He dropped into place and, planting paddle in shallows, sent the canoe well out with a vigorous thrust. Two strokes took it to the middle of the pool, where the current caught the little craft and sped it through more narrow and higher banks. A moment more, and the mouth of the gorge was yawning for them.

Alan rose carefully to his feet for a reconnaissance. He looked back first, and saw the prow of the second canoe glide out from the banks. He looked ahead. The rapids were a wilderness of shouting waters, white and green. But there was no escaping that ordeal. The canoe was already spinning between walls where the water ran deep and fast. The-man settled down to work with grim determination, pitting courage and strength and experience against the ravening, bellowing waters that tore at the canoe on every hand.

​He fought like one possessed. There was never an instant's grace between judgment and execution; and both must be instantaneous, or else—destruction. Again and again the canoe plunged wildly toward the instant annihilation which was avoided only by the timely plunge of a paddle, guided by luck or instinct or both. The one ray of hope in Alan's mind sprang from the fact that, however rough, the rapids were short. Now, when he had been in their grasp a minute, he seemed to have been there hours.

His labourings were tremendous, unbelievable, inspired. The goal of safety was within sight when Alan's paddle broke, and the canoe swung broadside to a boulder, turned turtle, and precipitated both headlong into that savage welter.

As the next few moments passed he was fighting. like a mad thing against overwhelming odds. Then,of a sudden, he found himself swimming mechanically in the smooth water of a wide pool beyond the lowermost eddy, the canoe floating bottom up nearby, and Rose supporting herself with one hand on it.

Her eye met his, clear with adorable courage. He floundered to her side, panted instructions to transfer her hand to his shoulder, and struck out for the nearer shore. Both found footing at the same time and waded out exhausted.

Then Alan remembered the pursuit. He looked ​up the rapids in time to view the last swift quarter of the canoe's descent, Judith in the bow, motionless, a rifle across her knees, in the stern an Indian guide kneeling and fighting the waters with scarcely perceptible effort in contrast with Alan's supreme struggles. Like a living thing the canoe seemed to gather itself together, it hurtled the eddy in a bound, took the still water with a mighty splash, and shot downstream at diminished speed.

Judith lifted her rifle and brought it to bear— upon her sister. With a cry of horror, Alan flung himself before Rose. For a breathless instant the woman in the canoe stared along the sights, then lowered her weapon and spoke to the guide, who instantly began to ply a brisk paddle. The canoe sped on and vanished round the bend.

"Why, in the name of heaven, why?" asked Alan, amazed.

The girl said dully: "Don't you know?" And when he shook his head. "Her guide told mine you had saved her life on the dam at Spirit Lake. Now do you see?"

His countenance was blank: "Gratitude?"

"Not gratitude alone, but something more terrible. … Not that I can blame her. … But come, if we strike through here we shall, I think, pick up a trail that will bring us to Black Beaver settlement by dark."

CHAPTER IX
Forewarned

THE thing was managed with an ingenuity that Alan termed devilish: it was indisputably Machiavellian.

The lovers had come down from the North in hot haste and the shadow of death. Two days of steady travelling, by canoe, by woods trail, by lake steamer, wore to a culmination through this endless afternoon on the train from Moosehead Lake. No sort of privacy or comfort was attainable in cars crowded to suffocation with fretful, sweating people, homeward bound from a week-end holiday over the Fourth.

Nor was it possible to discriminate, to guess whether or not they rode in the company of spies and enemies. Chin in hand, indifferent to discomfort, Alan brooded, his eyes fixed on this woman whom he loved, who had taken her life in her hand to save his life.

She lay back listlessly in the chair beside his, visibly wilting in the heat blast, her hair in disarray, her eyes closed, fair cheeks faintly flushed, pulses ​slowly throbbing in that exquisite, immaculate throat. …

He would have given worlds to be able to try and comfort her. But with all those abominable people——

No matter, the longest afternoon must have its evening; an hour or so more and they would be in Portland, surrounded by all the conveniences and safeguards of civilization, free at last to draw breath of ease in the land of law, order, and sane living.

The train had paused at the last hill station. Then as the trucks groaned and moved anew, a lout of a boy came galloping down the aisle, brandishing two yellow envelopes and blatting like a brazen calf.

"Mista' Lawr! Mista' Lawr! Tel'grams for Mista' Lawr!"

Alan snatched the envelopes, tipped the boy, and hoped to heaven he might break his sunburned neck as he tumbled off the rear steps.

He had been expecting a reply to his wire for reservations on the night express from Portland to New York. But why two envelopes superscribed "Mr. A. Law, Kineo train southbound, Oakland Sta?"

He tore one open, and grunted disgust with its curt advice; opened the other and caught his breath as he withdrew—part way only—a playing card—a Trey of Hearts.

Thrusting it back, he tore both envelopes into a ​hundred fragments and scattered them from the window. But the fiendish wind whisked one small scrap back into the lap of the woman he loved. The silken lashes trembled, lifted slightly, disclosing the dark glimmer of questioning eyes. And as she clipped the scrap of card-board between thumb and forefinger, he silently took from her one corner of the Trey of Hearts.

She nodded acknowledgment of his dumb solicitude but made no direct comment.

"The Pullman agent at Portland wires that there are no reservations available on any New York train in the next thirty-six hours," he said with lowered voice. "We'll have to rest up overnight, I guess."

"Couldn't we catch the New York boat to-night?"

"No. It leaves before we get in."

She said, "Too bad," abstractedly, reclosed her eyes, and apparently lapsed anew into semi-somnolence, but without deceiving him who could well guess what poignant anxiety gnawed at her heart.

He could have ground his teeth in exasperation: the impish insolence of that warning. To think that this was America, this the twentieth century, and still a man could be hunted from pillar to post, haunted with threats, and that by a slip of a girl with the cunning of a madwoman, the heart of a thug, the face the beloved woman that sat beside him.

​A surmise slowly settled into conviction that the woman Judith Trine, sister to the Rose he loved so well, was as mad as that monomaniac, her father, who sat helpless in his cell of silence and shadows in New York, impatient for the word that his vengeance had been consummated by the daughter whom he had inspired to execute it. …

In the dusk of evening the train lumbered into Portland station; and, heart in mouth, Alan helped Rose through the crowd and into a taxicab.

"Best hotel in town," he demanded. "And be quick—for a double tip."

He did not dare plume himself on a new escape. He dared not even trust this public chauffeur. Yet that one he distrusted, it seemed, without reason: shortly the cab stopped before a hotel of tolerable pretensions on a quiet street.

He had communicated his scheme to the girl en route, receiving her endorsement of it. Now, having registered for her and seen her to the door of the best available room in the house within call of the public lobby and office, he washed, gulped a hasty meal, and hurried away into the night with only the negro driver of a fortuitous hack for his guide.

CHAPTER X
The Captain of the "Seaventure"

HE WASTED the better part of an hour in fruitless inquiries: then his luck led him down a poorly lighted wharf, at the end of which he discovered a young man perched atop a pile, hands in pockets, gaze turned seaward, lips pursed—whistling. At the sound of footsteps this person turned to appraise the stranger, then, reassured, resumed his harmonious diversion of melancholy, and with it his gloomy stare across the water.

"Pardon me," Alan ventured, "perhaps you can help me out——"

"You've come to the wrong shop, my friend," the young man interposed. "I couldn't help anybody out."

"I thought possibly you might know where I could charter a seaworthy boat."

"What kind of a boat?" the young man demanded.

"Anything moderately fast, well-found and able, with accommodations for two passengers—one a lady."

The young man slipped down from his perch. ​"If you don't look sharp," he said, "you'll charter the Seaventure." He waved his hand toward a vessel moored nearby. "There she is, schooner-rigged, fifty feet over all, twenty-five horsepower auxiliary, two staterooms—all ready. Come aboard."

Alan accepted his invitation, and the light of the cabin lamp revealed to Alan's scrutiny a roughly modelled, good-humoured face enlivened by twinkling though steady blue eyes.

"Name, Barcus," said the young man, "christened Thomas. Nativity, American. State of life, flat broke. I found myself this spring with this boat on my hands, sunk every cent I had fitting out on an oral charter with a moneyed blighter in New York who was to have met me here a fortnight since. He didn't—and here I am, in pawn to the ship-chandler."

"How much do you owe?"

"Upward of a hundred."

"Say I advance that amount, when can we sail?"

"Pay my bills, and we can be off inside an hour. That is—I may have some trouble scaring up a crew."

"How much of a crew do you need?"

"One other who knows his job will be enough."

"Then that's settled," Alan said. "I know boats. I'll be your crew—and the better satisfied to have nobody else aboard."

​The eyes of Mr. Barcus clouded. "See here, what's your little game, anyway? I'll be no party to a kidnapping or——"

"It's an elopement," Alan interrupted on inspiration. "We've simply got to get clear of Portland by midnight."

"I'm on!" Barcus agreed. "God knows why I believe you, but I do."

"Now," Alan proceeded, "here's a hundred and fifty. Be ready for us in half an hour—ready to cast off the minute we come aboard."

"I'll be ready," Mr. Barcus agreed, and in a moment the feet of his employer drummed along the deck overhead while Barcus soliloquized: "I don't know your name; you haven't asked my price; if it wasn't for that smile of yours, my hair-trigger friend, I'd be less satisfied that this was my lucky day!"

CHAPTER XI
Blue Water

ANXIETY ate like an acid at Alan's heart. He could only hope against hope and count on haste to make his getaway. But when he reëntered the hotel, one surprising thing happened that gave him new heart: it seemed almost as if his luck had turned. For as he paused at the desk of the cashier to demand his bill, the elevator gate opened and Rose came out to meet him, with an eager air of hope masking her fatigue.

"I worried so I couldn't rest," she told him; "so I watched from the window till I saw you drive up. Then something told me you had been successful——"

He acquainted her briefly with his fortune. "It may be a little hard on you," he concluded, "but she's a comfortable boat enough, and with luck and decent weather——"

"I shall be all right," she protested. "I'm a good sailor, and I am so glad we're to get away. I have been oppressed all evening by a dreadful premonition."

​"Nonsense!" he cheered her insincerely. "What could happen in a staid old town like this? We're out of the woods at last!"

But she seemed unable to overcome the heaviness of her spirits even when their cab set them down at the wharf.

Here, Alan had feared, was the crucial point of danger. But his straining senses detected no sign of menace among those black, crowding shadows—and nothing happened. Mr. Barcus was found in cheerful waiting—the Seaventure ready to cast off, her motor already grumbling with impatience.

"All right?" he chirruped to his passenger and crew. "Jump aboard! We'll be off in a jiffy."

And he was as good as his word. Alan had barely set foot on deck, following the girl, when a smother of foam boiled up under the stern, the propeller blades gripped water, and the Seaventure swung away from the wharf.

After a careful search of the little craft, Alan, satisfied that all was well, nodded cheerfully.

"All right," he said to the girl. "We're clear of that lot, nobody but the three of us aboard. Now you'd best turn in. This is to be your stateroom, this one to port, and you'll have a long night's sleep to make up for what you've gone through, dearest."

He drew nearer, dropping his voice tenderly. ​And of a sudden, with a little low cry, the girl came into his arms and clung passionately to him.

"But you?" she murmured. "You need rest as much as I!"

"Oh, no, I don't," he continued. "Barcus and I stand watch and watch, of course. There's nothing for you to do but be completely at your ease. Good- night."

Eyes half-closed, she seemed to suffer his kiss rather than to respond, then turned hastily to her stateroom, leaving him staring in wonder at her strangeness. But he had no time for speculation. A surge of triumph in his heart, he ran up the companion-way and rejoined Barcus.

"Well?" Barcus asked amiably. "Find everything to your satisfaction?"

"I think so—quite. What can I do?"

"Stand by until we round the breakwater. Then take the wheel while I make sail. We'll catch a capful of wind as soon as we get out, and then this old hooker is due to set a pace you'll find surprising."

It was well on toward midnight before he finally relieved Alan and told him to turn in. By that time the Seaventure was spinning south-southeast, close reefed to a sou'west wind, the fixed white eye of Portland Headlight fast falling astern to starboard.

CHAPTER XII
The Counterfeiter

AT FOUR o'clock Alan was awakened by boot-heels pounding imperatively overhead, and tumbled on deck again, to stand both dog-watches. At eight o'clock, still aching with fatigue, he was free to return to his berth for another four-hour rest.

This time misguided consideration induced Barcus to let his crew sleep through the first afternoon watch. Six bells were ringing when, in drowsy consciousness that something had gone suddenly and radically wrong, Alan wakened. The steady onward urge of the little vessel had given place to wild rocking and pitching, while the song of the wind in the cordage was lost in the flapping and bellow of slack canvas.

For some reason evidently Barcus had found it necessary to bring the Seaventure up into the wind; but Alan could imagine no reason why he should have performed the maneuver in such lubberly fashion.

He was on deck almost before he rubbed the sleepiness from his eyes. His first glance discovered the wheel deserted, the woman with back to him ​standing at the taffrail, Barcus—nowhere to be seen. The second confirmed his surmise that the Seaventure had come up into the wind, and now was yawing off wildly into the trough of a stiff sea. A third showed him to his amazement a Gloucester fisherman—which they had overhauled with ease that morning and which now should have been well down the horizon astern—not two miles distant, and bearing directly down upon the smaller vessel.

Bewildered, he darted to the girl's side, demanding to know what was the matter. She turned to him a face he hardly recognized—but still he didn't understand. The interference was a thing unthinkable; his brain faltered when taxed to credit it. Only when he saw her tearing at the painter, striving to cast it off and with it the dory it dragged a hundred feet astern, and another glance discovered the head of Mr. Barcus rising over the stern of the tender as he strove to lift himself out of the water, did Alan appreciate what had happened.

It was with the feeling that all the world had gone mad, that he seized the girl and tore her away from the rail before she could unknot the painter.

"Rose!" he cried. "What's the matter with you? Don't you see what you're doing?"

She ceased to struggle and lay unresisting in his arms. "Let him go!" she muttered. "We don't want him—and he'll be picked up, right enough."

​"But—what are you thinking of, Rose——"

"Can't you say anything but 'Rose! Rose! Rose!' Is there no other name that means anything to you? It is intolerable! I love you no less than she—rather more—because I hate you, too! Can't you understand——?"

Convulsively she freed herself. "Let me go!" she insisted. "Let me go!"

"Judith!" he cried, stupefied. "But—good Lord! how did you get aboard? Where's Rose?"

"Where you'll not find her again," the woman retorted. "Trust me for that!"

"What do you mean?" Then illumination came. "Do you mean it was you whom I brought aboard last night?"

"Who else?"

"You waylaid her in the hotel, substituted yourself for her!"

"Of course. Why not? When I saw her sleeping there—what else should I think of than to take her place with the man I love? I knew you'd never know the difference. I was mad enough to think I could stand being loved by you in her name! It was only to-day, when I'd had time to think, that I realized how impossible that was!"

A cry from over the stern roused Alan to fresh appreciation of the emergency. With scant consideration he hustled the woman below, and closed ​her in with the sliding latch, then sprang to the taffrail to lend a helping hand to Mr. Barcus, who was climbing aboard, after he had pulled the dory up under the stern by its painter. He came over the rail in a temper, bellowed a blasphemous command to take the wheel and swing the Seaventure off again upon her course, and then pulled himself together.

"I hope you'll pardon the impertinence," he suggested acidly, "but may I inquire if that bloody-minded vixen is your blushing bride to be?"

Alan shook a helpless head. "No—it's all a damnable mistake. She's her sister—I mean, the right girl's sister—and her precise double—fooled me—not quite right in the head, I'm afraid."

"You may well be afraid!" Mr. Barcus snapped, "D'you know what she did? Threw me overboard! Fact! Came on deck sweet as peaches, and all of a sudden whips out a gun, points it at my head, and orders me to luff into the wind. Before I could make sure I wasn't dreaming, she had fired twice—in the air—a signal to that fisherman astern there: at least, it answered with two hoots of its whistle and changed course to run up to us. Look how she's gained already!"

A glance showed the vessel within a mile and apparently bent on running them down.

"But how did she happen to throw you overboard?"

​"Happen nothing!" Barcus roared. "She did it a' purpose! I had a notion to get that gun away before she did mischief with it, but when I knocked it out of her hand she flew at me like a wildcat, and before I knew what was up, I was slammed backward over the rail. God's mercy gave me a chance at the dory—and at that this giddy she-devil of yours was trying to cast me adrift!"

"I can't tell you how sorry I am," Alan responded gravely. "It's a hideous mix-up, and I'd no business dragging you into it——"

"Amen to that!"

"There's more to tell—but one thing to be done first."

"And that?" Mr. Barcus inquired.

"To get rid of the lady," Alan announced firmly. "Those must be her people aboard that fisherman; and if we let her stop aboard she's certain to do something to cripple us—if she hasn't already; and if that boat ever overhauls us, I'm as good as done for—murdered. It sounds insane, but it's so."

"It doesn't sound insane to me, my friend," said Mr. Barcus ruefully, "not after the last half hour."

"Then take the wheel."

"What are you going to do?"

"Make the fisherman a present. You don't mind parting with the dory—if I pay for it?"

"Take it for nothing," Barcus grumbled.

​He took Alan's place, watching him with a sardonic eye as he drew the tender in under the leeward quarter, made it fast, and reopened the companionway. As the girl came on deck, in a rage that only heightened her loveliness, Alan noted a glimmer of satisfaction in her glance astern as she recognized how well the fisherman had drawn up on them,

"Friends of yours, I infer?" Alan inquired.

Judith nodded: "I don't mind telling you she was ordered out of Gloucester by telegraph five minutes after you struck your bargain with this gentleman."

"It would be unkind of us to keep you longer from your friends," Alan observed. "And it will save trouble if you'll be good enough to step into the dory without a struggle."

Without a word, Judith swung herself overside into the dory. Immediately Alan cast off, and for some minutes there was silence between the two men while the tender dropped swiftly astern.

Then suddenly elevating his nose, Barcus sniffed. "Here," he said sharply, "relieve me for a minute, will you? I want to go forward and have a look at that motor."

In the time that he remained between decks the fisherman luffed, picked up the dory and its occupant, and came round again in chase of the Seaventure.

When Barcus reappeared it was with a grave face.

​"What's the trouble now?"

"Nothing much, only your playful little friend has been up to another of her light-hearted tricks. … The drain-cocks of both fuel tanks have been opened, and there are upward of a hundred and fifty gallons of gasoline sloshing around in the bilge."

He cast a shrewd eye aloft and astern. "Stop where you are," he said, "and let her come up only when I give the word. I'm going to let out those reefs. We can stand more sail—and there's no telling how much longer the reef will keep going. It looks to me as if we were up against it—'specially if your lady friend isn't satisfied. Which, from the way that fisherman sticks to us, doesn't seem likely."

CHAPTER XIII
Holocaust

YES, yes," said Mr. Barcus indulgently.

"Very interesting. Very interesting indeed. I've seldom listened to a more interesting life-history, my poor young friend. But I don't believe one word of it. It's all damn foolishness! Particularly this! The rest of your adventures are reasonable enough. They won my credulity—and I'm a native son of Missouri. But this last chapter is impossible. And that's flat. It couldn't happen—and has. And there we are!"

Against the western horizon a strip of sand dunes rested like a bar between the sunset in the sky and the ensanguined sea that mirrored it.

The wind had gone down with the sun, leaving the Seaventure becalmed—her motor long since inert for want of fuel—a mile or so off Nauset Beach.

Farther offshore, the so-called Gloucester fisherman rode, without motion, waters still and glassy. Figures might be seen moving about her decks; and soon she lowered a small boat. A little later a faint humming noise drifted across the tide.

​

ALAN GAZED IN WONDER; FIRST AT THE "TREY O' HEARTS" AND THEN AT THE ROSE

​

ALAN'S ARRIVAL WAS THE SIGNAL FOR MUCH EXCITEMENT.

​"Power tender," said Barcus. "Coming to call, I presume. Sociable lot. What I can't make out is why do they tow our dory back. Uneasy conscience, maybe—what?"

Alan grunted his disgust, but said nothing.

"Don't take it so hard, old top," Barcus advised. Then he rose and dived down the companion-way, presently to appear with a megaphone and a shotgun.

"No cutting-out parties in this outfit," he explained, grinning amiably. "None of that old stuff, revised to suit your infatuated female friend. Once aboard the lugger and the man is mine!"

Stationing himself at the rail, he bellowed through the megaphone.

"Keep off! Come within gunshot and I'll blow your fool heads off!" Putting aside the megaphone, he sat down again. "Not that I'd dare fire this blunderbuss," he confided, "with this reek of gasoline. Phew-w! I've inhaled so much gas in the last few hours, I'm dry clean down to my silly old toes!"

For thirty minutes nothing happened. The fishrman's launch was resting motionless on the water, two figures mysteriously busy in its cockpit, the Seaventure's dory trailing behind it.

Gradually these details were blotted out by the closing shadows. Far up the coast two white eyes, peering over the horizon, stared steadfastly through the dark: "Chatham Lights," Barcus said they were.

​Abruptly he dropped the glasses and jumped up. "Hear that?" he cried.

Now the humming of the motor was again audible and growing louder every instant; and Alan, infected with the excitement of Barcus, could just make out a dark shadow that moved swiftly and steadily toward the Seaventure.

"What the devil!" he demanded, puzzled. Barcus grasped his arm excitedly.

"Quick—kick off your shoes—get set for a mile-long swim! Devil's work, all right!" he panted, divesting himself of shoes and outer garments. "I couldn't make out what they were up to till I saw them lash the wheel, light the fuse, start the motor, and take to the dory. They've made a torpedo-boat out of that tender——"

He sprang upon the rail, steadying himself with a stay. "Ready?" he asked. "Look sharp!"

The two dived as one, and not until three hundred feet or more separated them from the schooner did either dare pause for a backward glance.

Then the impact of the launch against the Seaventure's side rang out across the waters, and with a roar the launch blew up, spewing skyward a wide-spread fan of flame. There followed a crackling noise, and bright flames licked out all over the schooner from stem to stern. It seemed minutes that she burned in this wise—it was probably not so ​long—before her decks blew up and the flames swept roaring to the sky.

By the time Alan and Barcus had gained shoal water that permitted them footing to wade ashore, waist-deep, the Seaventure had burned to the water's edge.

CHAPTER XIV
Marooned

ON NAUSET BEACH, Alan and Barcus sprawled on the sands, some distance back from the water, and listened to the thumping of their overtaxed hearts, and panted. Now and again one would lift his head and stare out over the waters at a little line of reddish flames: all that remained to witness to the fact that, an hour since, these two had been in command of as trim and seaworthy a little schooner as ever ventured the trip from Portland to New York. Farther out again a green eye stared unblinking over the water: the starboard light of the becalmed fishing schooner whose crew had caused the disaster.

"Barcus," said Alan, "what I can't understand is why those damned thugs out there thought we'd be asses enough to stay aboard the Seaventure and get burned up."

The other replied: "Did they?"

"Looks that way. If they didn't, why were we permitted to swim ashore? There was nothing to prevent their rowing round to cut us off."

"Maybe they did, and missed us, Mr. ​Law-and-Order! We were a wee mite excited, you've got to admit. It's possible we didn't hear the noise of their oars. And it's black enough for them to have overlooked us. A man's head in the water isn't really a conspicuous object on a dark night."

"I suppose not," said Alan indifferently. "It doesn't matter. Tell me, Barcus, what's the nearest symptom of civilization?

"Chatham village," said Mr. Barcus, "six miles or so to the no'th'ards, and cut off by an inlet. Then there's the lighthouse on Monomoy Point, three miles to the south."

A silence followed, broken only when Mr. Law voiced a thought bred of malignant contemplation.

"I'd give a deal to know who's aboard that vessel."

"You don't mean you think your regular young woman——!"

"It's possible," said Law. "Judith kidnapped her in Portland. That's not so far from Gloucester a motor-car couldn't have caught that schooner before she sailed to waylay us this morning. And what better way to take care of a girl you've kidnapped than to ship her somewhere by sea, in the care of trustworthy hellions——?"

"Don't ask me. I've done very little kidnapping."

"For tuppence," said Law, "I'd swim off to that boat and see for myself."

"For two million dollars, I would not!" Barcus ​affirmed. "I'm as wet as I mean to be for the next twenty-four hours."

A moment later the line of little flames went out, and the owner of the late Seaventure fancied he could hear the hiss of smouldering timbers sucked under and drowned out.

"Exit," he announced moodily, "exit Seaventure. R. I. P.—a good little ship!"

"Oh, let up, can't you?" Mr. Law exclaimed peevishly. "I'm sorrier than you are—and, after all, it's my loss: I've got to buy you another boat. All you've actually lost is your temper."

"And my susceptibility to the charms of the sex," Mr. Barcus corrected. "Nothing can ever restore my lost faith in woman's gentleness. When you brought aboard that young woman I thought butter wouldn't melt in her mouth, and first thing I know she ups and points a gun at my head and tips me overboard, and then makes a pretty bonfire out of my sailboat."

For a moment the two maintained attentive silence. Then a little flutter of sound came from across the water. Gradually it gathered volume, and became recognizable as the lisp of cautious oars.

"I'm going away from here," Mr. Barcus announced firmly.

"Half a second," Alan Law pleaded. "I've got a scheme."

​"Rot!" Barcus interrupted; "all you've got is what I've got—a bare chance for your life by running like hell for Monomoy Light. If we're sticking round here when that boat lands, this blithe elopement of yours is liable to finish like that Dead March from Saul!"

"Yes—but listen!" Alan insisted. "They've got to land, haven't they, and leave the boat while they look for us? Well, then, what's to prevent our hiding in the dunes and——?"

"It's a head you've got on your shoulders," Barcus struck in admiringly. "Chances are they'll pot us in the act; but I never did dote on walking, and it's all of three miles to Monomoy Light!"

In the next breath, "Look out!" he shrieked. A blue flare had broken out in full blaze on the surface of the water near them, revealing a dory which had drawn in under cover of the darkness, and at the same time discovering to its occupants the two startled figures on the beach. Before they could stir, a spiteful tongue of flame spat out, and a bullet sang between them and buried itself in the sands behind them.

The two turned and pelted off down the beach, seeking to escape that deadly area of illumination. Other shots sped them, but none was so well aimed as the first; and presently they gained the grateful shelter of the night-wrapped dunes.

​"Easy!" Barcus counselled, pulling up. "Not too far into this wilderness, or we'll be lost."

Meantime the dory had grounded on the beach, and its occupants, jumping out, set off in pursuit of the fugitives, following their tracks with the aid of electric flash-lamps. The darkness, however, conspired with the labyrinth of the dunes to save Alan and his companion. It was a matter of comparative ease to confuse the chase.

Within five minutes—while the chase floundered at random a quarter mile to the south—Law and Barcus were squirming snakelike up the back of a ten-foot bluff. From its brow they looked down on the spot where the dory lay—under armed guard—an unhappy fact made evident by the play of a flash-lamp intermittently raking the beach on every hand.

In an interval of blackness, slowly and stealthily Alan got to his feet and swung back a heavy club of driftwood which he had chanced upon. A pause ensued, of waiting for the flash-light to make sure of his aim. Instead of that, a match spluttered, revealing with its reddish glow a bronzed and evil visage intent upon the bowl of a pipe.

The guard puffed fast and had the tobacco well aglow when the sky took advantage of his trustfulness and fell upon him like an avalanche. Simultaneously, Alan and Barcus slid down the face of ​the bluff and finished what the treacherous sky had left undone. By the time the disarmed guard had recovered sufficiently to cry for help, the dory was a hundred yards off the beach and making excellent time in the direction of the green light.

They wrought at the oars with a machine-like precision that drove the boat fast and furiously. Concealment of their purpose from those aboard the schooner was out of the question. The racket and the play of flash-lamps along the beach must have betrayed the fact that they had turned the tables long before the dory left the inshore shoals.

Caution, however, made them rest on their oars while yet a little way from their goal. No sound was audible other than the whine of an ungreased block; nothing was visible beyond the glare of the green lantern.

"What think?" Barcus whispered.

"No telling," Alan replied. "All a chance."

"You've got that gun handy?"—with reference to the rifle of which they had despoiled the victim of the sky's ill-faith.

"Here."

"Then—let's go to it! Give way!"

A dozen strokes brought them alongside, and the two young men dropped oars, rose, and seizing the low gunwale, lifted themselves to the deck. Nothing opposed them: the deck was silent and deserted. ​Alan led the way aft and down the companion-way to the cabin where a dim light burned. Of the two stateroom doors, one disclosed an empty cabin, the other was locked, Trying the handle, Alan fancied he heard a sound within. Pausing, he called, with a thrill of fearful hope:

"Hello in there!"

The response was a cry of incredulous delight: "Alan!"

By way of answer he hurled all his hundred and eighty pounds against the door. The lock splintered away from its socket, the door flew open with a bang, and Alan strode into the room with a cry: "Rose!"

His sweetheart met him halfway, her arms uplifted, her countenance transfigured.

The discreet Mr. Barcus turned and ascended the companion-way, his nose wrinkled with misgivings.

"Blest if I know how he can tell 'em apart," he remarked. "Not that I blame him for taking a chance: it wouldn't pain me any to find out I'd kissed the wrong girl—not, that is, unless she didn't care for my technique. In that case, I guess the sequel would be apt to prove tolerable agonizing!"

CHAPTER XV
Dead Reckoning

SOME ten minutes later a hail from the deck disturbed the lovers.

"Below there! I say—Law!—wind a-coming!"

"Right O! Half a minute!"

But that stipulated delay was several times multiplied before Alan showed up on deck, to find Barcus bending a laborious back to the capstan. Already a breath of coolness stole through the warm languor of the night: blocks creaked, canvas shivered: there was a sibilant murmur in the water outside.

"Lend a hand, can't you?" Barcus complained. "I didn't interrupt you just to get an audience. The sooner we get this anchor in——"

"But I don't want the anchor," Alan protested. "It isn't my anchor. I say, cut the cable—or let it run."

Barcus stepped back from the capstan and kicked open the pawl, with the result that the windlass began merrily to unwind.

"My compliments! I never thought of that. ​If you'd only betray as much intelligence in managing your private affairs——"

Alan checked him. "What's that?" he demanded in a tone tense with apprehension. The rumbling of a marine motor drifted down on the wings of the sluggish winds.

"Don't ask me. I'm afraid to guess!"

"But they couldn't possibly——"

"Since when did you set up to be a judge of possibilities? Nothing probable ever happened to you 's far's I can make out. I know there are two life-saving stations on Nauset, both with modern equipment—motor lifeboats and all. Our business is to get out of here quick, and not advertise our exit, either. Take that port light in and dowse it, while I do the same by the starboard. Then duck below and put out the cabin lamp. Then, if this blackness holds, we may manage an invasion!"

There followed an exceedingly busy quarter of an hour. They were clever sailormen, used to all sorts of craft, and the end of that period found the schooner with sheets taut and canvas full to a good easterly breeze—the light on Monomoy Point watching them from over the starboard beam.

"Hear anything more of that power boat?" Alan asked, joining Barcus by the wheel.

"Nothing—wind too fresh."

"Better let me stand the first trick—what?"

​"Nix! I know my way about these shoals blindfold, whereas you couldn't weather Monomoy safely in broad daylight. Get under the table and be a good dog—d'you hear?"

With a chuckle, Alan obediently stretched himself out on the deck.

"I say, Law! You seem pretty easy in your mind about this young woman below. Sure you ain't been stung twice?"

"Sure," Alan asserted with conviction.

"Well, I reckon you ought to know. But to me, she's the same that tried to send me to Davy Jones' locker. How did she get aboard here?"

"I fancy they chloroformed her, while she slept in that hotel in Portland. Whether or no, Rose woke up in a closed motor-car—bound and gagged, of course—and was brought aboard at Gloucester about midnight."

"Simple when you know how," Barcus commented. "Cuddle down, now, and I'll sing you to sleep." Unconsciousness like a cloud soon descended upon Alan's overwearied faculties. …

He awoke with a yawn and a shiver, in the gray of chill daybreak. A thick fog pressed heavily upon the face of the waters, and moisture beaded all things, even Alan's face and hands. Barcus stood at the wheel, reeling with weariness, his eyes half-closed In a face like a mask of fatigue.

​"Can't keep up much longer," he apologized thickly; "stood it about as long as I can. Take your trick and give me forty winks."

"You're a brick!" Alan protested. "Why didn't you call me sooner?"

"No good! I knew the way—you didn't. That is, I did until this accursed fog closed down. Now—God knows where we are—by my reckoning somewhere in Nantucket Sound."

Grasping a handle on the wheel-box, he jerked it three times; and the automobile horn blared raucously a threefold response up forward.

"Keep that going, three blasts, then a minute interval—and if the devil takes care of his own we may escape being run down."

With a sigh he collapsed upon the deck, and was almost instantly asleep. Hither and yon in the obscurity fog-signals of other shipping sounded a concert of discordance—the man-power horn of a catboat crying the warning back to the deep-throated whistle of a coastwise steamship and the impertinent drumming of a motor-boat's exhaust with the muffler cut out. This last boxed the compass, sounding now here, now there, now near, now far; though the complaints of other shipping diminished in volume and died away in the distance, giving place to others, still the plutter-plutter of that motor was never altogether lost.

​Vainly straining his vision against the blank pallor of the encompassing fog, Alan wondered, worried, dreaded. …

At irregular intervals, starting from proccupation, he would manipulate the brass pull on the wheel-box, provoking the horn's stuttering blasts of protest. It seemed improbable that any of the schooner's former crew could fail to recognize that weirdly singular whoop, a sound like nothing else that Alan could recall.

Only the coldest comfort was to be extracted from the reflection that, even with the aid of that fog- signal, hunting a lost schooner in those mist-masked waters was a task like that traditional one of the needle and the haystack. Alan's life of late seemed simply one endless tissue of wild improbabilities. So long as his luck held, the least likely thing was always to be considered the one thing most certain to come to pass.

And the exhaust of that restless motor-boat was never for an instant still: it echoed an incessant strumming from the surface of the waters as from some gigantic sounding-board.

CHAPTER XVI
Debacle

THE loneliness of Alan's vigil was eventually relieved by the appearance on deck of the woman he loved.

The tableau that greeted her—of one haggard wretch at the wheel and the other lying at his feet in the stupor of fatigue—instantly wrung from Rose a little cry of solicitude.

Warm food and hot coffee lent a little tone to Alan's spirits, and he was presently able to discuss their situation.

"There's only one way out of it I can see—flight. If we win safely in New York, the only thing is for us to marry with all haste and leave the country by the first boat."

By way of answer she nestled still more closely into the hollow of his arm, and he continued: "Otherwise, I can't see anything for it but to fight the enemy with their own weapons. What I'm most afraid of is that sometime I may forget it's a woman I'm defending myself against. When a fellow's fighting for his life he can't always stop to calculate the weight of his blows."

​There was a little pause; then: "Death," the girl said slowly, "I'm not sure it wouldn't be merciful to Judith."

"But not by my hand!"

"Oh, no! Not that, not that! But she isn't responsible—not quite sane, I think. And even if you are spared, my dear one, there are lives of others to consider, presuming she stays at large."

"I've thought of that," he said gravely. "If only she could be put away some place and watched—restrained——"

"You've my consent," Rose responded. "But even so, my father and his agents remain to be dealt with!"

The young man held her closer to him: "Don't fear, I'll find some way out without injuring either of them. I promise you that!"

He sealed the pledge upon her lips. …

And in that moment from some point forward a crash sounded simultaneously with the dull shock of collision with a smaller vessel; and a strange voice cried out in exultation. The decks rang loud with a crush of booted feet pounding aft. Alan sprang toward the companion-way to fetch the rifle. But his feet slipped. He went down, and an instant later two men fell heavily upon him—active, strong fellows in the dress of fishermen. He was suffered to rise only as a prisoner, helpless in the grasp of two ​pairs of powerful hands. Barcus was rudely jerked to his feet and held captive by two more fishermen. A fifth had taken charge of Rose, clamping her wrists in the vise of one big hand. The sixth and sole other member of the boarding party was—Judith Trine.

Down the side a heavy lifeboat ground its way astern, the loose end of its painter slipping over the rail even as Alan caught sight of it. Observing this, one of the men in charge of Alan addressed Judith for leave to retrieve the boat.

"No—let it go. Hold that man fast till I fetch a rope. We'll make sure of them both this time!"

Straining forward, Rose implored her sister: 'Judith, in pity's name, think what you are doing!"

"Hold your tongue!" Judith snapped. "Another whimper, and I'll have you gagged. "Yes, I'll——"

The balance of her threat was drowned out by the sudden roar of a steamship fog-signal so close aboard that it seemed almost to emanate from the forepart of the schooner herself.

It was answered by cries of terror from a dozen throats and Alan found himself released as his captors sprang toward the taffrail. He caught a glimpse of the towering bows of a great steamer—sweeping swiftly toward them. Some one aboard the schooner bellowed a terrified appeal:

"Stop your engines! Shut off your propeller! Stop your——"

​Then, like the wrath of God, the steamship overwhelmed them, its bows sliced through the schooner as a knife through cheese. …

When Alan came up he struck out at random. Aware of several dark objects dotting the surface not far away, he swam for the nearest: the head was a woman's, the face turned toward him the face of Rose.

He gasped wildly: "Keep cool! Don't struggle! Put one hand on my shoulder and——"

What happened then was never quite clear: he knew only that he was forced to fight for his life—that the woman flung herself upon him like some maddened animal, clutching his throat, winding her limbs around his, dragging him down and down. …

Primitive instinct alone saved him. He remembered freeing an arm, drawing it back, delivering a blow with all his strength, and that he was then free and struggling back to the air.

Then a boat-hook caught and dragged him some distance, until two strong hands caught him beneath the armpits and held his head above water. He looked up witlessly into the face of Barcus, and still bewildered, struggled feebly. But the other's voice brought him back to his senses: "Easy, old top! Take it easy! You're all right now—rest a minute, then help me get you aboard."

He obeyed, and presently, with considerable ​assistance from Barcus, contrived to scramble in over the gunwales of a boat which proved to be the stolen lifeboat. Aside from Barcus and himself it held one other person only—the woman he loved, crumpled up and unconscious, in the bow. He strove to rise and go to her, but Barcus restrained and quieted him.

"There! Easy, I say! She's all right—fainted—that's all! She and I took the water in practically the same spot, and luck threw this blessed boat my way. No trouble at all."

"But the others—Judith! I left her out there—unconscious—she'll drown, I tell you!"

"And I'll tell you something!" said Mr. Barcus severely. "You'll lie quiet and shut up or I'll dent your dome with an oar. Let her drown—and a good job, I say ! Don't you know the meaning of 'enough?' Merciful heavens, man, you're the most insatiable glutton for punishment ever!"

But Alan wasn't listening. There was a horror in his heart.

Dead! Judith dead! Back there, in the fog and the cold … dead by his hand!

CHAPTER XVII
The Masked Voice

THE leaden fog wrapped the world in an embrace as inexorable as the coils of some great, gray, slimy serpent. Through its sluggish folds the life-boat crept at snail's pace. In the bow, Rose rested in exhaustion, her eyes closed, her head pillowed on a life preserver, her sodden garments modelled closely to the slender body that ever and again was shaken by a long, shuddering respiration.

Seated on the nearest thwart, Alan watched over her with a grimly hopeless solicitude. Premonition of misfortune darkened his heart with an impenetrable shadow. In the stern, Tom Barcus presided morosely over the steering gear.

Thus for hours on end it had been with these three: ever the boat ploughed steadily onward. Destitute of compass and of all notion of the sun's bearings, Barcus steered mainly through force of habit—the salt-water man's instinctive feeling that no boat under way should ever in any conceivable circumstance lack a hand at the helm.

For some time subsequent to the collision ​fog-signals sounding now near, now far, in the encompassing obscurity had fostered hope; but now for more than an hour the silence had been uncannily constant, broken only by the rumble of the motor, the lisp of water slipping down the slide, the suck and gurgle of the wake.

Forebodings no less portentous than Law's crawled in the mind of Barcus. It was as likely as not that the lifeboat was travelling straight out to sea. And gasoline tanks can and oftentimes do become—empty. Moreover, Barcus was a confirmed skeptic in regard to the reliability of marine motors. In view of all which considerations he presently opened the battery switch. The cessation of that uniform drone was startling enough to rouse Rose Trine from her state of semi-somnolence. With a look of panic she sat up, thrust damp hair back from her eyes, and nervously inquired:

"What's the matter?"

"Nothing," Barcus replied: "I shut the engine off—that's all." Then, uninterrupted, the stillness strangled their spirits in its ruthless grasp, until of a sudden a cry shrilled through the fog, so near at hand that it seemed scarcely more distant than over the side:

"Ahoy! Help! Ahoy there! Help!"

So urgent was its accent that it brought the three as one to their feet, all a-tremble, eyes seeking one another's faces, then shifting uneasily away.

​"What can it be?" Rose whispered, aghast, shrinking into Alan's ready arm.

"Some other unfortunate," Alan replied, obviously with an effort. For his flesh crawled with superstitious dread. He knew that voice; it was the voice of one whom he had believed dead, drowned fathoms deep, miles from that spot.

"Judith!" the girl moaned.

"Impossible!" Alan contended. "I saw her go down. …

"That doesn't prove she didn't come up," Barcus broke in acidly.

"Ahoy! Motorboat aho-o-oy! Help!"

Alan cupped hands to mouth and sent an answer ringing through the murk.

"Ahoy! Where are you? Where away?"

"Here—on the reef—half drowned—perishing with cold——"

"How does my voice bear?" Alan called back.

"What the dickens do you care?" Barcus interpolated suspiciously.

"To port," came the response. "Starboard your helm and come in slowly!"

"Right O! Half a minute!" Alan replied assuringly.

"Like hell!" Barcus muttered in his throat as he bent over the flywheel.

Jumping on the forward thwart and balancing ​himself perilously near the gunwale, Alan peered into the fog.

"Can't make out anything," he grumbled. "Start her up—but 'ware reef!"

"Nothing doing," Barcus retorted curtly. "The motto is now, 'Full speed astern!'"

"Oh, come! We can't leave a woman—in a fix like that!"

"Can't we? You watch!" Barcus grunted, rocking the flywheel with all his might; for the motor had turned suddenly stubborn.

"Alan!" Rose pleaded, "think what it means. I know it sounds heartless of me—my own sister—but you know how mad she is—wild with hatred and jealousy. If you take Judith into this boat, it's your life or hers!"

"If we leave her out there," Alan retorted, "it's her life on our heads!"

At this juncture the motor took charge of the argument and settled it in summary fashion. With a smart explosion it started up unexpectedly in reverse, at one and the same time precipitating Alan overboard and almost dislocating the arm of Mr. Barcus. Alan struggled to the surface just in time to see the bows of the lifeboat back away and vanish into the mist.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.