on getting us this time. So we'd best be starting.
Hold on a minute, though; I want to leave proof behind that we haven't
gone off with either of the schooners."

With this he ran down to the oil house, in which their well-nigh
forgotten prisoner was still confined. Flinging open the door, he
said, in a tone of well-feigned regret:

"It is too bad, Monsieur Delom, that you should have been kept so long
in this wretched place, but I dared not attempt your release while
those terrible Yankees were here. Now, however, they are gone and you
are once more free. Also, as I realise that I can no longer maintain
my factory here, you are at liberty to make what use you please of its
contents. Accept my congratulations on your good fortune, monsieur.
As for me, I must now leave you to prepare for my journey to St. Johns."

With this White bade the bewildered Frenchman a mocking adieu, and left
him still blinking at the sunlight from which he had been so long
secluded.

A few minutes later the Baldwin house again stood, closed and
tenantless, while a cart driven by Cola, and accompanied by the two
young men on foot, climbed the hill back of the village by a road
leading to the nearest railway station. Monsieur Delom witnessed this
departure, as did many others, but no one saw the cart leave the
highway a little later and turn into a dim trail leading through an
otherwise pathless forest. After a time it emerged from this on
another road and came to a farmhouse to which Mrs. Baldwin had
previously been taken. Here mother and son bade each other farewell,
while the former also prayed for a blessing upon the stranger who had
so befriended them, and whose fortunes had become so curiously linked
with theirs. Then the cart with Cola still acting as driver rattled
away, and was quickly lost to sight.

It lacked but an hour of sunset when our refugees reached a pocket on
the outer coast, in which the two schooners lay snugly, side by side,
nearly filling the tiny harbour. On the beach David Gidge already
waited, and, as the lads transferred their few effects to the boat that
had brought him ashore, he climbed stiffly into the cart which Cola was
to guide back over the way it had just come.

"Good-bye, Cola," said Cabot, as he held for a moment the hand of the
girl he had come to regard almost as a sister. "Try and have a lot of
specimens ready for me when we come back."

"Good-bye, sister!" cried White. "Take care of m