're outgunned now. The
Americans are there in force. And we have them beaten in the air at
last. You know what that means if you've been across."

"Don't I know it," the man responded feelingly. "By the Lord, it's me
that does know it. I was there when the shoe was on the other foot. I
was a gunner in the Sixty-eighth Battery, and you can believe me there
was times when it made us sick to see German planes overhead. Well, I
hope they give Fritz hell. He gave it to us."

"They will," Thompson answered simply, and on that word their talk of
the war ended. They spoke of Vancouver, and of the coast generally.

"By the way, do you happen to know whereabouts in Toba Inlet a man named
Carr is located?" Thompson bethought him of his quest. "Sam Carr. He is
operating some sort of settlement for returned men, I've been told."

"Sam Carr? Sure. The _Squalla_ here belongs to him--or to the
Company--and Carr is just about the Company himself."

A voice from the interior abaft the wheelhouse bellowed "Grub-pi-l-e."

"That's breakfast," the man said. "I see you ain't lighted your fire
yet. Come and have a bite with us. Here, make this line fast and lay
alongside."

The wind had died with the dawn, and the sea was abating. The _Squalla_
went her way within the hour, and so did Thompson. There was still a
small air out of the southeast, sufficient to give him steerageway in
the swell that ran for hours after the storm. Between sail and power he
made the Redonda Islands and passed between them far up the narrow gut
of Waddington Channel, lying in a nook near the northern end of that
deep pass when night came on. And by late afternoon the following day he
had traversed the mountain-walled length of Toba Inlet and moored his
yawl beside a great boom of new-cut logs at the mouth of Toba River.

Thanks to meeting the _Squalla_ he knew his ground. Also he knew
something of Sam Carr's undertaking. The main camp was four miles up the
stream. The deep fin-keel of the yawl barred him from crossing the
shoals at the river mouth except on a twelve-foot tide. So he lay at the
boom, planning to go up the river next morning in the canoe he towed
astern in lieu of a dinghy.

He sat on his cushions in the cockpit that evening looking up at a calm,
star-speckled sky. On either side of him mountain ranges lifted like
quiescent saurians, heads resting on the summit of the Coast Range,
tails sweeping away in a fifty-mile curve to a lesser elevation