showing neither bow nor side-lights: a stealthy and mysterious
apparition creeping toward the dock with something of the effect of an
animal about to spring.

And immediately he heard a man's voice from the boat, abrupt with anger:

"Not this place, you ass--the next."

"Shut up," another voice replied. "There's somebody on that dock."

At the same time the bows of the boat swung off and the shadow slipped
away to westward--toward the Fiske place.

A wondering apprehension of some nameless and desperate enterprise,
somehow involving the woman who obsessed his thoughts, crawled in
Whitaker's mind. The boat--running without cruising lights!--was seeking
the next landing-stage. Those in charge of it had certainly some reason
for wishing to escape observation.

Automatically Whitaker turned back, let himself down to the beach, and
began to pick his way toward the Fiske dock, half running despite his
stiff ankle and following a course at once more direct and more
difficult than the way through the woods. That last would have afforded
him sure footing, but he would have lost much time seeking and sticking
to its meanderings, in the uncertain light. As it was, he had on one
hand a low, concave wall of earth, on the other the wash of crisping
wavelets; and between the two a yard-wide track with a treacherous
surface of wave-smoothed pebbles largely encumbered with heavy
bolster-like rolls of seaweed, springy and slippery, washed up by the
recent gale.

But in the dark and formless alarm that possessed him, he did not stop
to choose between the ways. He had no time. As it was, if there were
anything evil afoot, no earthly power could help him cover the distance
in time to be of any aid. Indeed, he had not gone half the way before he
pulled up with a thumping heart, startled beyond expression by a cry in
the night--a cry of wild appeal and protest thrown out violently into
the turbulent night, and abruptly arrested in full peal as if a hand had
closed the mouth that uttered it.

And then ringing clear down the wind, a voice whose timbre was
unmistakably that of a woman: "_Aux secours! Aux secours!_"

Twice it cried out, and then was hushed as grimly as the first
incoherent scream. No need now to guess at what was towards: Whitaker
could see it all as clearly as though he were already there; the
power-boat at the dock, two women attacked as they were on the point of
entering their rowboat, the cry of the mistress suddenl