shrewd, though weak, and his heart was full of the stuff in which
personal loyalty is bred and fostered. If the hand that beat him was the
hand that fed him--the hand of his master--then the beating seemed an
honorable and reasonable thing to him. True, the skipper had not yet
lifted a fist to him; but in this case darkling glances served quite as
well as blows. Bill had seen the strength of Dennis from the first and
from the first had loved it as a thing to serve--as the spirit of
mastery. Nick Leary, though a much younger man than Bill Brennen,
possessed the same spirit of service.

The three searched the barrens all day, from sun-up to dark, north,
south and inland. It was a gray day, sloppy underfoot and raw overhead.
At one time the skipper halted and lit his pipe within three yards of
the point of the edge of the cliff from which Quinn had pitched to his
death; but wind, snow and thaw had obliterated all trace of those
blindly staggering feet. The searchers explored the inner, tangled
recesses of a dozen thickets of spruce-tuck, snarled coverts of alders,
hollows hip-deep in sodden snow, and the pits and rocky shelters of
knolls and hummocks.

"He bes hid away somewheres, sure's Saint Peter was a fisherman," said
the skipper.

"Axin' yer pardon, skipper, I bes t'inkin' as how maybe he bain't dead,"
said Nick Leary, humbly. "Maybe he got t'rough to Brig Tickle, sir, an'
from the Tickle he'd be headin' for Witless Bay this very minute."

The skipper shook his head.

"There bain't a man on the coast could live t'rough a flurry the like o'
that widout he found shelter," he replied. "He bes dead somewheres widin
t'ree or four mile o' Chance Along, ye kin lay to that, Nick."

They returned to the harbor after dark and said not a word to the others
about the business that had occupied them throughout the day; Brennen
and Nick Leary were asked many questions, but they lied valiantly,
saying that they had been spying out boat-timber. Had they admitted that
they had devoted a whole day to searching over the barren for the body
of Foxey Jack Quinn a suspicion that the missing man had carried away
something of extraordinary value would have fired the harbor and set
every able-bodied inhabitant on the quest. That would not have suited
the skipper's plans. He did not want a knowledge of the necklace of
diamonds and rubies to become general.

Doubtless the search for Jack Quinn would have been continued on the
following