astily, and drag atop the heavy cross-beams of his tackle; quick
upon the oars again he needed to be, desperate of baling. Still the water
oozed and trickled in, to lie up to his ankles and slowly to rise. There
was no making out to sea; from the Isle Sinister he owned himself cut off
by thick-set barriers; only the shore remained not absolutely
unattainable though furthest it was.

Patiently and cautiously the boy felt his way. From stroke to stroke he
held on safely, steady, quick-eyed, but told by the gradual water
against his shins that his boat must shortly founder. Conscience smote
him hard; the near sure prospect of swimming for bare life among the
breakers opened his eyes. He had held as his very own to risk at will his
boat and his life; now, with pangs of remorse, he recognised the superior
claim of a grey-haired couple, who had been parents to him, who bereft of
him would go down to the grave in grief and poverty. Of life, and the
means of living, but little right had he to dispose, considering their
due and their need.

The gunwale sank low, lower, till a lurch might displace the cross-beams,
for they lost in weight as the water within the boat deepened. Yet point
by point success attended, and released the foolhardy lad and his boat
from dire extremity. They have chance of clean deliverance; they are past
the last girdle of breakers, hardly a furlong from the shore; they are
upon sleek water, with the tide against them but lazily.

The boy rowed on with long, smooth strokes; the mere sway of his body was
as much as the boat could carry, so little above the water was the
gunwale. He had halved the distance, when down she went beneath him; and
he swam, waded, stood ashore, the first man who had ever won there
living by way of the sea.

But little elate could he be. He could glean drifting oars and
stretchers, his boat might be recovered from the out tide, but the Isle
Sinister lay remote as ever. And his heart had fallen.

Ugly necessity gave no choice but to face the breakers again in retrace
of his perilous way; for an alternative he could not entertain that would
entail certain evils more to be dreaded than any risk.

Straying aimlessly along the desolate shore, the boy pondered, nervous
now of many risks he had braved hardily. He stopped once at sight of a
grey patch of calcined rock. There it must have been that, not so long
ago, wreckage had been gathered and burned scrupulously, and with it the
b