with a frowning glance.

The man in the sloop held his course.

"Damn you, MacRae; lay to, or I'll run you down," the patriarch at the
cutter's wheel shouted, when a boat's length separated the two craft.

MacRae's lips moved slightly, but no sound issued therefrom. Leaning on
the tiller, he let the sloop run. So for a minute the boats sailed, the
white yacht edging up on the sloop until it seemed as if her broaded-off
boom would rake and foul the other. But when at last she drew fully
abreast the two men sheeted mainsail and jib flat while the white-headed
helmsman threw her over so that the yacht drove in on the sloop and the
two younger men grappled MacRae's coaming with boat hooks, and side by
side they came slowly up into the wind.

MacRae made no move, said nothing, only regarded the three with sober
intensity. They, for their part, wasted no breath on him.

"Elizabeth, get in here," the girl's father commanded.

It was only a matter of stepping over the rubbing gunwales. The girl
rose. She cast an appealing glance at MacRae. His face did not alter.
She stepped up on the guard, disdaining the hand young Gower extended to
help her, and sprang lightly into the cockpit of the _Gull_.

"As for you, you calculating blackguard," her father addressed MacRae,
"if you ever set foot on Maple Point again, I'll have you horsewhipped
first and jailed for trespass after."

For a second MacRae made no answer. His nostrils dilated; his blue-gray
eyes darkened till they seemed black. Then he said with a curious
hoarseness, and in a voice pitched so low it was scarcely audible:

"Take your boat hooks out of me and be on your way."

The older man withdrew his hook. Young Gower held on a second longer,
matching the undisguised hatred in Donald MacRae's eyes with a fury in
his own. His round, boyish face purpled. And when he withdrew the boat
hook he swung the inch-thick iron-shod pole with a swift twist of his
body and struck MacRae fairly across the face.

MacRae went down in a heap as the _Gull_ swung away. The faint breeze
out of the west filled the cutter's sails. She stood away on a long tack
south by west, with a frightened girl cowering down in her cabin,
sobbing in grief and fear, and three men in the _Gull's_ cockpit casting
dubious glances at one another and back to the fishing sloop sailing
with no hand on her tiller.

In an hour the _Gull_ was four miles to windward of the sloop. The
breeze had taken a sudden