y had no water to drink.

Their hasty meal seemed to do them good. Finding that their dory was
still afloat, they began to lose their fears. Indeed, little by little,
the height of the waves lessened. The tide was beginning to spread in
the wider parts of the channel.

"Let's try the oars again," said Rob, at last.

To their delight they found that they could give the dory some headway.
But in which direction should they row? Small wonder that in these
crooked channels, with the wind shifting continually from the shore and
the veil of fog alternately lifting and falling again, they took the
wrong course.

They had now been afloat for some hours, although at that season of the
year there is daylight for almost the entire twenty-four hours, so that
they had no means of guessing at the time. They had passed entirely
across the mouths of two or three of the great inland bays, which make
into the east shore of Kadiak Island. At the time when they flattered
themselves they were making their best headway back toward town, they
were really going in the opposite direction, caught by the stiff tide
which was running between Ugak Island and the east coast of Kadiak. In
all, they remained in the dory perhaps ten or twelve hours, and in that
time they perhaps skirted more than one hundred miles of shore-line,
counting the indentations of the bays, although in direct distance they
did not reach a total of more than fifty or sixty miles. At the head of
one of these bays, had they but known it, there were salmon rivers where
fishing-boats occasionally stopped; but all that they could do was to
use the best of their wisdom and their strength, and they kept on,
steadily pulling, believing that the tide had turned, whereas in truth
they were going down the coast still with the tide and approaching the
mouth of the vast crooked bay known as Kaludiak, half-way down the east
coast of the great island. Thus they were leaving behind a possible
place of rescue. Although their first fright had in time somewhat worn
away, they were now tired, hungry, thirsty, and, in fact, almost upon
the point of exhaustion.

All at once, at an hour which in the United States would probably have
been taken to be just before sundown, but which really was nearly eleven
o'clock at night, a change in the contour of the coast caused the wind
to whip around once more. The fog, broken into thousands of white, ropy
wreaths, was swept away upward. There stretched of