eft them to sink with a dizzy swing into the hollow of
the sea.

They pulled desperately as another white-topped ridge came on astern,
and they went up with it amid a chaotic frothing and splashing of spray.
After that there was a shock and a crash. They sprang out into the
knee-deep water and held fast to the boat while the foam boiled into
her. Before the next sea came in they had run the boat up beyond its
reach, and they discovered that there was not much the matter with her
when they hove her over. Wyllard looked back at the tumbling surf.

"Dampier was right about that topsail; it won't be quite so easy getting
off," he declared. "You'll stand by, Charly, and watch the schooner. If
the surf gets steeper you can make some sign. I'll leave one of the
Siwash on the rise yonder."

Then he walked up the beach. On the crest of the low rise a mile or two
behind it, he stopped a while, gazing out at what seemed to be an empty
desolation. There were willows in the hollow beneath him, and upon the
slope a few little stunted trees, which resembled the juniper that he
had seen among the ranges of British Columbia, but he could see no sign
of any kind of life. What was more portentous, the mossy sod he stood
upon was frozen, and there were stretches of snow among the straggling
firs upon a higher ridge. Inland, the little breeze seemed to have
fallen dead away, and there was an oppressive silence which the rumble
of the surf accentuated.

Wyllard left one of the Indians on the hill and going on with the other
scrambled through a half-frozen swamp in the hollow; but when they came
back hours afterwards as the narrow horizon was drawing further in, they
had found nothing to show that any man had ever entered that grim,
silent land. The surf seemed a little smoother, and they reeled out
through it with only a few inches of very cold water splashing about
their boots, and pulled across a long stretch of darkening sea toward
the rolling schooner.

Wyllard was weary and depressed, but it was not until he sat in the
stern cabin with its cheerful twinkling stove and swinging lamp that he
understood how he had shrunk from that forbidding wilderness. His
consultation with Dampier, who came in by and by, was brief.

"We'll head north for a couple of days, and try again," he said.

He crawled into his berth early, and it was some time after midnight
when he was awakened by being rudely flung out of it. That fact, and the
slant of