d by, Charly, and watch the
schooner. If the surf gets steeper you can make some sign. I'll leave
one of the Siwash on the rise yonder."

Then he walked up the beach, and stopped awhile on the crest of the low
rise a mile or two behind it, gazing out at what seemed to be an empty
desolation. There were willows in the hollow beneath him, and upon the
slope a few little stunted trees, which he fancied resembled the
juniper he had seen among the ranges of British Columbia, but he could
see no sign of any kind of life. What was more portentous, the mossy
sod he stood upon was frozen, and there were smears of snow among the
straggling firs upon a rather higher ridge. Inland, the little breeze
seemed to have fallen dead away, and there was an oppressive silence
which the rumble of the surf accentuated.

He left an Indian on the rise, and going on with the other scrambled
through a half-frozen swamp in the hollow; but when they came back
hours afterwards as the narrow horizon was drawing further in they had
found nothing to show that any man had ever entered that grim, silent
land. The surf seemed a little smoother, and they reeled out through
it with no more than a few inches of very cold water splashing about
their boots, and pulled across a long stretch of darkening sea towards
the rolling schooner.

Wyllard was a little weary, and more depressed, but it was not until he
sat in the stern cabin with its cheerful twinkling stove and swinging
lamp that he understood how he had shrunk from that forbidding
wilderness. His consultation with Dampier, who came in by and bye, was
very brief.

"We'll head north for a couple of days, and try again," he said.

He crawled into his berth early, and it was some time after midnight
when he was awakened by being rudely flung out of it. That fact, and
the slant of deck and sounds above, suggested that the schooner had
been hove down by a sudden gale. He had, however, grown more or less
accustomed to occurrences of this kind and to sleeping fully dressed,
and in another moment or two he was out of the deck-house. Then a wind
that seemed sharp as steel drove stinging flakes of snow into his face.
It was very dark, but he fancied that the schooner's rail was in the
sea, which was washing over her to weather, and that some of the others
were struggling to get the mainsail off her. Then a man whom he
supposed to be Charly ran into him.

"Better come for'ard. Got to haul outer j