the cabin in a mighty
shock of thunder and wind and rain, a bellow of recognition came from
Ericksen. They gripped hands.

The Swede's voice rose above wind and rain and the rattle of loose
windows, and he was saying something about three years ago and rubbing
the sleep from his eyes, when the strange look in Alan's face made him
pause to hear other words than his own.

Five minutes later he opened a door looking out over the black sea,
bracing his arm against it. The wind tore in, beating his whitening
beard over his shoulders, and with it came a deluge of rain that
drenched him as he stood there. He forced the door shut and faced Alan,
a great, gray ghost of a man in the yellow glow of the oil lamp.

From then until dawn they waited. And in the first break of that dawn
the long, black launch of Olaf, the Swede, nosed its way steadily out
to sea.

CHAPTER X

The wind had died away, but the rain continued, torrential in its
downpour, and the mountains grumbled with dying thunder. The town was
blotted out, and fifty feet ahead of the hissing nose of the launch Alan
could see only a gray wall. Water ran in streams from his rubber
slicker, and Olaf's great beard was dripping like a wet rag. He was like
a huge gargoyle at the wheel, and in the face of impenetrable gloom he
opened speed until the _Norden_ was shooting with the swiftness of a
torpedo through the sea.

In Olaf's cabin Alan had listened to the folly of expecting to find Mary
Standish. Between Eyak River and Katalla was a mainland of battered
reefs and rocks and an archipelago of islands in which a pirate fleet
might have found a hundred hiding-places. In his experience of twenty
years Ericksen had never known of the finding of a body washed ashore,
and he stated firmly his belief that the girl was at the bottom of the
sea. But the impulse to go on grew no less in Alan. It quickened with
the straining eagerness of the _Norden_ as the slim craft leaped through
the water.

Even the drone of thunder and the beat of rain urged him on. To him
there was nothing absurd in the quest he was about to make. It was the
least he could do, and the only honest thing he could do, he kept
telling himself. And there was a chance that he would find her. All
through his life had run that element of chance; usually it was against
odds he had won, and there rode with him in the gray dawn a conviction
he was going to win now--that he would find Mary Standish somewhere in