he felt the sand giving under his feet. The old mare
uttered again her terrified snort. He saw dimly the path behind them
moving--a swift, serpentlike slide. Heavy as the mare was, she felt
the landslip, too.

Cap'n Ira was not a man who easily lost his self-possession. He had
been through too much to show the white flag when danger menaced. He
realized that peril threatened now.

He turned squarely about and, cocked pistol in one hand and
huge-knobbed cane in the other, he started away from the spot at a
cripple's gallop. The whole trough of the gully of sand seemed to be
in motion. Behind him the old mare scrambled and whistled with fear,
quite as unable to keep her feet as was the captain.

For, before he had gone far, Cap'n Ira found himself seated on the
moving plane of sand. He glanced fearfully behind him. The Queen of
Sheba was seated on her tail, her forefeet braced against nothing
more stable than the avalanche itself, and she was sailing down the
slope behind him like a winged Pegasus!

"My soul and body!" ejaculated Cap'n Ira. "We're certainly on our
way."

CHAPTER IV

AT THE LATHAM HOUSE

The Latham house stood in the middle of the shallow valley behind
Wreckers' Head. The fields surrounding it were arable and well kept.
The house was not as old as the Ball house and was of an entirely
different style of architecture. Whereas the Ball house was
low-roofed and sprawling, squatting like a huge and ugly toad on the
gale-swept Head, the house Tunis Latham's grandfather had built was
three-story, including the mansard roof, painted a tobacco brown,
and it was surrounded by wry-limbed cedars which could grow here
because they were sheltered from the gales.

It was a gloomy-looking house even in midsummer, standing like a
grim figure menaced by the tortured limbs of the trees surrounding
it, stark and alone. No other human habitation was in view from its
site. The Latham who had built the twelve-room house had built on
hope. He desired and expected to fill the great house with a breed
of Lathams that would do honor to the Cape on sea and on land. But
his young wife had died the next year, after giving birth to her
second child.

Tunis Latham's father, Randall Latham, had been the elder Latham's
sole hope of perpetuating the family name and filling the big, ugly
brown house behind Wreckers' Head with tow-headed little Lathams,
for the other child was a girl.

It was said that Medford Latham