y through his megaphone,
aimed toward a group of men on the shattered bridge. "Are you trying
to see how quickly you can sink? Why don't you put her head up?"

A young officer in a wet and bedraggled uniform crawled along the
swaying platform to the megaphone rack and, seizing a cone, shouted
from a kneeling posture:

"Help us, for God's sake! Our thrust shaft has cracked!" The words
came faintly. "Our Captain was washed from the bridge. . . . Tried to
put out sea anchor, but couldn't make it hold without steerage
way. . . . It broke adrift. . . . This . . . the _Veiled Ladye_, with
Mr. Horace Howland and a party aboard."

The _Veiled Ladye_! Absorbed as Dan was, he felt a momentary flash of
surprise that the announcement of that name came to him almost as a
matter of course. Through the long course of nearly two years the
conviction that a time would come when he should once more meet the
girl who had spoken to him from the _Veiled Ladye's_ deck at Norfolk
had strengthened inexplicably, until he had come to accept it as an
assured fact. Was she aboard that yacht now? Aboard that laboring
section of gingerbread, in the hands of incompetents and poltroons?
Was she? It could not be otherwise. And this was the nature of the
meeting which had colored his dreams and intensified the ambitions of
his waking moments!

A strange thrill quivered through him, and he glanced dazedly at
Mulhatton, as a stout man in yachting garb stumbled to the officer's
side and snatched the megaphone from his hands.

"On board the tug!" he cried. "I'm Horace Howland of the Coastwise and
West Indian Shipping Company. We're helpless; we can't last an hour
unless you hold our head up. Engineer making a collar for cracked
shaft . . . have it made and fitted in twelve hours. Twelve hours.
Hold us up that long and we are safe! Do you hear me . . . twelve
hours!"

Dan looked at the yacht, rolling to her beam ends almost every minute.
It would be a bad business fooling with that craft; and with iron will
he fought back his surging emotions. He had his tug and his men to
consider, if not himself. His tug was weakened by her long struggle,
and to the best of his judgment he knew it would be wiser for his own
interests to go his way, leaving the yacht to her life fight, while the
_Fledgling_ fought hers. And yet he could not go away. Aside from the
wild theory that the girl might be aboard, there were lives to save
over there.