load the boat before the storm, the men had
dropped the sack and it had burst open.

"But how careless of them, Loll, not to peg the tent down again," she
said. Loll, however, was already headed for the first camp-site made
when landing on the northeast side of the Island. Her call brought his
eager answer:

"Aw, come on, Jean, I want to see how drowned we'd be if we'd stayed
there during the storm."

Smiling to herself at the boy's love of dwelling on their narrow
escapes from death, real and imaginary, the girl turned and picking up
a stone drove in a few of the tent-pegs before she followed him.

On each side of the trail great patches of rice-grass had been
flattened from the force of the wind and rain, and the air was filled
with the sweet smell of vegetation drying in the sun. As she
approached the other side, the blue sky curved down to meet the ocean
on a far straight line. The yellow-green of the sea was set off by
astonishing areas of clearest cobalt blue, and the flying spray from
combers breaking for miles out on the North Shoals, caught the sunlight
in a glory of rainbow mist.

"See, I told you, Jean," Loll nodded sagely and pointed ahead as she
overtook him.

A hundred feet above the place where the first camp had been the
rice-grass had been torn out by the roots and whitened drift-logs and
kelp were massed there confusedly.

In silence the girl stood looking at the spot. Emotions of fear,
thankfulness and something of reverence swept her. Lollie, looking
down over the freckles on his nose, vested the lower part of his face
in his hand in a manner reminiscent of Kayak Bill.

"Escaped, by hell, by the skin of our teeth!" he gloated.

The tide had been coming in fast during the past half hour. Jean,
noting it, suddenly turned back, and with uneasy haste began the
homeward journey.

Opposite the little lake where Boreland had shot the first ducks, Loll
insisted on running up to the beach line to look over and see whether
there were any more birds feeding there. Jean, waiting for him,
watched him make his way through the short grass to the narrow, sandy
lake-shore, and then stoop to look at something. . . . All at once he
raised his head, and with a strange, blanched look on his little face,
glanced quickly, fearfully behind him into the tall alder thicket
toward the hill. Then, wide-eyed, he sprang toward her without a sound.

"Wha--what is it, Loll?" she gasped.

The boy's eyes sh