however, proved an adept at the difficult business,
and eventually the schooner _Selache_ crept out from the Narrows at
dusk one evening under all plain sail, painted a pale green, with her
big main-boom raking at least a fathom beyond her taffrail. There were
then Wyllard, Dampier, and two other white men on board her. A week
later she sailed into a deep, rock-walled inlet on the western coast of
Vancouver Island with a settlement at the top of it, where the
storekeeper made no difficulty about selling Wyllard all his flour and
canned goods at higher figures than there was any probability of his
obtaining from the local ranchers.

Then the _Selache_ slid down the inlet again, and lay for several days
in a forest-shrouded arm near the mouth of it, while, when she once
more dropped her anchor off a Siwash rancherie far up on the wild West
coast, she was painted a dingy grey, and her sawn-off boom just topped
her stern. One does not want a great main-boom in the northern seas,
and a big mainsail needs men to handle it. Wyllard, however, shipped
several sea-bred Indians who had made wonderful perilous voyages on the
trail of the seal and halibut in open canoes. All of them had, as it
happened, also sailed in sealing schooners. Their comrades sold him
furs, and filled part of the hold up with redwood billets and bark for
the stove, for he had not considered it advisable to load too much
Wellington coal. Then he pushed out into the waste Pacific, and when
once a beautiful big white mail boat reeled by him, driving with
streaming bows into an easterly gale, he sent back a message to his
friends upon the prairie. It duly reached them, for some three weeks
afterwards Allen Hastings, opening _The Colonist_, which he had ordered
from Victoria as soon as Wyllard sailed, read out to his wife and
Agatha a paragraph in the shipping news:

"_Empress of India_, from Yokohama, reports having passed small grey
British schooner, flying----" There followed several code letters, the
latitude and longitude, and a line apparently by the water-front
reporter: "No schooner belonging to this city allotted the signal in
question."

Hastings smiled as he laid down the paper. "No," he said, "that
signal's Wyllard's private code. Agatha, won't you reach me down my
map of the Pacific? It's just behind you."

Then he looked round, and noticed the significant smile in his wife's
eyes, for the girl had already turned towards the shelf w