aid Agatha simply, "if you would care to tell me?"

The man looked down on her with a little wry smile. "I haven't told it
often, but you shall hear," he said. "It's a tale of a black failure."
He stretched out a hand and pointed to the sliding fog and ranks of
tumbling seas. "It was very much this kind of night, and we were
lying, reefed down, off one of the Russians' beaches, when I asked for
volunteers. I got them--two boats' crews of the finest seamen that
ever handled oar or sealing rifle."

"But what did you want them for?"

"A boat from another schooner had been cast ashore. It was blowing
tolerably hard, as it usually does where the Polar ice comes down into
the Behring Sea. They'd been shooting seals from her. We meant to
bring the men off if we could manage it."

"Wouldn't one boat have been enough?"

"No," said Wyllard drily, "we had three, and I think that was one cause
of the trouble. There was one from the other schooner. You see, those
seals belonged to the Russians, and we free-lances could only shoot
them clear off shore. I'm not sure that the men in the wrecked boat
had been fishing outside the limit."

Agatha did not press for further particulars, and he went on:

"We managed to make a landing, though one boat went up bottom
uppermost," he said. "I fancy they must have broken or lost an oar
then. We also got the wrecked men, but we had trouble while we were
getting the boats off again. The surf was running in savagely, and the
fog shut down solid as a wall. Any way, we pulled off, and went out
with a foot of water in us, while one of the rescued men took my oar
when I let it go."

"Why had you to let it go?"

Wyllard laughed in a rather grim fashion.

"I got my head laid open with a sealing club," he said. "Some of the
rest had their scratches, but they managed to row. For one thing, they
knew they had to. They had reasons for not wanting to fall into the
Russians' hands. Well, we cleared the beach, and once or twice as I
tried to bale there was a shout somewhere near us, and the loom of a
vanishing boat. It was all we could make out, for the sea was slopping
into her, and the spray was flying everywhere. If there had only been
two boats we'd probably have found out our misfortune, and perhaps have
set it straight. As it was, we couldn't tell it was the same boat that
had hailed us."

He broke off for a moment, and then added quietly, "Two boats reached
the schooners