tle tug. Suddenly the girl held out her hand.

"Good-by," she said.

"Good-by?" he stammered, "Surely it isn't good-by?"

The Egret's starboard ladder was gently chaffing the tug's fender.

"It isn't good-by!" he said.

"I am afraid it is." She watched him as he went over the side onto the
tug's deck. The Egret, as if freed from a burden, shot sharply
forward. Annette leaned far over the rail.

"Good-by," she murmured. "Good-by!"

XXVI

"Mr. Payne, I take it?"

Roger turned to face the speaker, a tall, hawk-nosed man whose sallow,
leathery face was set in the lines of the hard worker.

"Yes, I'm Payne. Are you the captain?"

"I'm boss of the ditching outfit, Mr. Payne. White's my name. Was you
planning we should lay up at Gumbo Key to-night?"

Roger looked across the bay at the last glimpse of the Egret's white
hull as she sped into the mouth of the river. The setting sun glinted
on paint and nickel and brasswork. It was fancy, perhaps, but he
seemed to make out the figure of Annette still leaning over the
starboard rail.

"Yes--I was," he said slowly. The Egret shifted her course slightly,
and like the snuffing of a light disappeared round the first bend in
the river.

"Well, I dunno," said White. "So far's I'm concerned the quicker I get
my outfit up the river the better I'll like it."

"Do you know the river well?"

"Reckon I do."

"Can you run it by night?"

"Shore can--especially as it's going to be broad moonlight."

"All right," said Roger. "Let's go."

All through the night, without halting save for occasional engine
trouble, the little gasoline tug dragged its unwieldly tow up the
tree-lined reaches of the Chokohatchee River. The moonlight illumined
the waterway as with a million softly shaded lights. The Spanish moss
which hung from the live oak and cypress along the bank was transmuted
into scintillating draperies of twinkling silver. Upon the flowing
water the light lay like an immutable sheen, seemingly a part of the
flowing current, an endless stream of molten silver. Fishes, snakes
and nocturnal animals broke and rippled the sheen of the water's
surface. A huge, sharp fin ripping the silver before the tug's bows
told of a tarpon strayed far inland with the tide. An otter's head,
round and hard, jutted up, looked round, dove again.

In the magic light and shading, the tubby lines of the little tug were
softened and altered; its paint-cracked deck and whe