ight but keen and salty breath blew in from the sea. Cap'n Ira
faced this breeze with twitching nostrils. The old mare's lower lip
hung down in depression. She groaned. She did not care to be led out
of her comfortable stall at this unconscionably early hour.

"Grunt, you old nuisance!" muttered Cap'n Ira bitterly. "You don't
even know what a dratted, useless thing you be, I swan!"

There was a depression in the field. When the heavy spring and fall
rains came the water ran down into this sink and stood, sometimes a
foot or two deep over several acres. In some past time of heavy
flood the water had washed out to the edge of the highland
overlooking the ocean beach. There it had crumbled the brink of the
Head away, the water gullying year after year a deeper and broader
channel, until now the slanting gutter began a hundred yards back
from the brink.

The recurrent downpours, aided by occasional landslips, had made a
slanting trough to the beach itself, which was all of two hundred
feet below the brink of Wreckers' Head. Many such water-worn gullies
are to be found along the face of the Cape headlands, up which the
fishermen and seaweed gatherers freight their cargoes from the
shore. There was no wheel track here; merely a trough of sliding
sand, treacherous under foot and almost continuously in motion. As
the gully progressed seaward, the banks on either hand became more
than forty feet high, the trough itself being scarcely half as wide.

Determinedly Cap'n Ira led the old mare into and down the slope of
this gully.

It was steep. He went ahead haltingly, trying to steady his
footsteps with the cane, which sank deeply into the sand, making
orifices which, in the pale light of the dawn, seemed to startle the
mare. She held back, scuffling and snorting.

"Come on, drat ye!" adjured the captain. "You needn't blow your
nose. You ain't been taking snuff."

The sand was so light and dry that it seemed to be on the move all
about them. There was a stealthy sound to the whispering particles,
too, as though they breathed. "Hush.' Hush-sh-sh!" The old man was
made nervous by it. He began to glance back over his shoulder at the
faintly objecting mare. When Queenie slipped a little and scrambled
in the unstable sand he uttered such an exclamation as might have
been wrung from him at time of stress upon his quarter-deck.

"I swan! I'd rather be keelhauled than do this," burst from his lips
finally.

But they were well i