d evilly that each
word seemed a drop of venom. "But I'll make him pay. I'm goin' to St.
John's, and when I get back it will be the sorriest day in his life
and yours, too. His life won't be worth the thread it hangs on!"

With that he went up the companionway and, not noticing the greeting
of Captain Tanner, dropped into his yellow dory that swung and bumped
against the _Rosan's_ side. Swiftly he rowed to the _Nettie B._ and
clambered aboard, bellowing orders to get up sail. In fifteen minutes
the schooner was on the back track under every stitch of canvas she
carried.

Bijonah Tanner stared blankly after the retreating _Nettie_. Then,
knowing that his daughter had been with Nat, dropped down into the
little cabin.

He found Nellie seated in the chair by the little table, and weeping.

CHAPTER XIV

A DISCOVERY

Taken aback as he had been by the strange doings of Nat's schooner,
his dismay then was a feeble imitation of the panic that smote him
now. It had long been a favorite formula of Bijonah's that "A
schooner's a gal you can understand. She goes where ye send her, an'
ye know she'll come back when ye tell her to. She's a snug, trustin'
kind of critter, an' she's man's best friend because she hain't got a
grain o' sense. But woman!"

Here Bijonah always ended, his hands, his voice, and his sentence
suspended in mid air.

Now he was baffled completely. Here was a girl who was deeply in love,
crying. He tiptoed cautiously to the deck again and stole forward to
the galley as though he had been detected in a suspicious action.

After a while the storm passed, and Nellie sat up, red-eyed and
red-nosed, but with a measure of her usual tranquillity restored.

"Idiot!" she told herself. "To howl like that over _him_!"

Nellie finally regained her poise of mind and remembered that she had
been at the point of writing a letter to her mother (to be mailed by
the first vessel bound to a port) when Nat had interrupted her.

The table at which she sat was a rough, square one of oak, with one
drawer that extended its whole width. She opened the drawer and found
it stuffed with an untidy mass of paper, envelopes, newspapers,
clippings, books, ink, and a mucilage-pot that had foundered in the
last gale and spread its contents over everything.

Such was her struggle to find two clean sheets of paper and a pen that
she finally dumped the contents of the drawer on top of the table and
went to the task seriously