t would make a spar. I can't head right
away for Vancouver with no mainsail."

This was clear to Wyllard, who made a feeble gesture. "If the wind
comes easterly?"

Dampier pursed his face up. "Then unless I could fetch one of the
Kuriles we'd sure be jammed. She won't beat to windward, and there'd
be all Kamtchatka to lee of us. The ice is packing up along the north
of it now, and the Russians have two or three settlements to the south.
We don't want to run in and tell them what we're after."

A faint smile crept into Wyllard's eyes. "No," he said, "not after
that little affair on the beach. Since it's very probable that the
vessel they send up to the seal islands would deliver stores along the
coast, the folks in authority would have a record of it. They'd call
the thing piracy--and, in a sense, they'd be justified."

He said nothing more for a little, and then looked up again wearily.

"I wonder," he said, "how that boat's crew ever got across to
Kamtchatka. It was north of the islands where the man brought Dunton
the message."

Dampier understood that he desired to change the subject, for this was
a question they had often discussed already.

"Well," he said, "I still hold by my first notion. They were blown
ashore on the beach we'd just left, and made prisoners. Then a supply
schooner or perhaps a steamer came along, and they sent them off in her
to be handed over to the authorities. The vessel put in somewhere.
We'll say she was lying in an inlet with a boat astern, and somehow
they cut that boat loose in the dark, and got away in her."

He broke off for a moment, and then looked at his companion
significantly.

"You can find quite a few points where that idea seems to fail," he
added. "They were in Kamtchatka, but I'm beginning to feel that we
shall never know any more than that."

Wyllard made a little weary gesture of concurrence, but before he
closed them Dampier saw no sign that he meant to abandon his project in
his eyes. In another few minutes he seemed to sink into sleep, and
Dampier, who went up on deck, paced to and fro awhile before he stopped
by the wheel and turned to the helmsman.

"You can let her come up a couple of points. We may as well make a
little southing while we can," he said.

Charly, who was steering, looked up with suggestive eagerness. "Then
he's not going for the Aleutians?"

"No," said Dampier drily. "I was kind of afraid of that, but I choked
him off.