and such driving. Even Pete
Ellinwood began to lose his heartiness as the _Lass_ went down and
stayed down longer with each vicious squall.

"Shut up, Pete!" said Code, when the mate started to speak. "No sail
comes off but what blows off, and while there's all sail on the
_Nettie_ I carry all sail if I heave her down for it. Watch him,
he'll break. Burns is yellow."

The words were a prophecy. He had hardly uttered them when down came
the great balloon jib of the _Nettie B._ At once the _Lass_ began to
gain in great leaps and bounds. They were fifty miles from home and
two miles only separated them.

But fortune had not finished with Code. Half an hour later there came
a great sound of tearing like the volley of small arms, and the
_Lass's_ balloon jib ripped loose and soared to heaven like some
gigantic wounded bird.

"Let it go, curse it," growled Code. "Anyway, I didn't take it down."

The loss of her big jib was the only thing that saved the _Lass_ from
being hove down completely, for two hours later the gale had reached
its height, and she was laboring like a drunken man under her
staysail, topsail, and four lowers.

Twenty miles from home and the two schooners were abreast, tacking
together on the long leeward reaches and the short windward ones, as
they made across the Bay of Fundy.

"Look at her comin' like a racehorse!" cried Ellinwood again, and this
time Code recognized the vessel that was pursuing them. It was the
mystery schooner, and in all his life at sea Code had never seen a
ship fly as that one was flying then.

"Wonder what she's up to now?" he asked vaguely. But he gave no
further thought to the matter, for the _Nettie B._ claimed all his
attention. Suddenly from between the masts of the Burns schooner a
great flutter of white appeared as though some one had hung a huge
sheet from her stay.

"Ha, I told you he was yellow!" shouted Code in glee. "Somebody's cut
away one edge of the stays'l. Now we've got 'em!"

And they had; for within a quarter of an hour they left the _Nettie
B._ astern, finally defeated, Nat Burns's last act of treachery gone
for nothing.

But the mystery schooner would not be denied. Though the _Lass_ made
her seventeen knots, the wonderful Mallaby schooner did her twenty,
with everything spread in that gale; and when the white lighthouse of
Swallowtail Point was in plain sight through the murk, she swept by
like a magnificent racer and beat the _Charming Lass_ to