tiful big
white mail boat reeled by him, driving with streaming bows into an
easterly gale, he sent back a message to his friends upon the prairie.
It duly reached them, for three weeks afterward Allen Hastings, opening
_The Colonist_, which he had ordered from Victoria as soon as Wyllard
sailed, read to his wife and Agatha a paragraph in the shipping news:

"_Empress of India_, from Yokohama, reports having passed small gray
British schooner, flying----" There followed several code letters, the
latitude and longitude, and a line apparently by the water-front
reporter: "No schooner belonging to this city allotted the signal in
question."

Hastings smiled as he laid down the paper. "No," he observed, "that
signal is Wyllard's private code. Agatha, won't you reach me down my map
of the Pacific? It's just behind you."

As he looked around he noticed the significant expression on his wife's
face, for the girl already had turned towards the shelf where he kept
the lately purchased map.

The easterly gale that started did not last, for the wind came out of
the west and north, and sank to foggy calms when it did not blow
wickedly hard. This meant that the _Selache's_ course was all to
windward, and though they drove her unmercifully under reefed
book-foresail, main trysail, and a streaming jib or two, with the brine
going over her, she had made little headway when each arduous day was
done. They were drenched to the skin continuously, and lashed by
stinging spray. Cooking except of the crudest kind was out of the
question, and sleep would have been impossible to any but worn-out
sailors. The little crew was often aroused in the blackness of the night
to haul down a burst jib, to get in another reef, or to crawl out on a
plunging bowsprit washed by icy seas as the schooner lay with her lee
rail under. Glad as they were of the respite it was even more trying to
lie rolling wildly on the big smooth waves that hove out of the windless
calm, while everything in the vessel banged to and fro. When the breeze
came screaming through the fog or rain they sprang to make sail again.

Fate seemed to oppose them, as it was certain that, if their purpose was
suspected, the hand of every white man whom they might come across would
be against them. But they held on over leagues of empty ocean.

The season wore away, and at last the wind freshened easterly, and they
ran for a week under boom-foresail and a jib, with the big gray combers