ion predominant over all other thoughts, he became
conscious of a huge black mass surging upon him out of the darkness.
An instant's buffet with the current, an ineffectual attempt to dive
beneath it, a horrible sense that the weight at his feet was dragging
him down,--and the huge log, loosened from the raft, was upon him,
crushing him beneath its rough and ragged sides. All thoughts of
self-murder vanished with the presence of actual peril, and uttering
that despairing cry which had been faintly heard by Troke, he flung up
his arms to clutch the monster that was pushing him down to death. The
log passed completely over him, thrusting him beneath the water, but his
hand, scraping along the splintered side, came in contact with the loop
of hide rope that yet hung round the mass, and clutched it with the
tenacity of a death grip. In another instant he got his head above
water, and making good his hold, twisted himself, by a violent effort,
across the log.

For a moment he saw the lights from the stern windows of the anchored
vessels low in the distance, Grummet Rock disappeared on his left, then,
exhausted, breathless, and bruised, he closed his eyes, and the drifting
log bore him swiftly and silently away into the darkness.

* * * * *

At daylight the next morning, Mr. Troke, landing on the prison rock
found it deserted. The prisoner's cap was lying on the edge of the
little cliff, but the prisoner himself had disappeared. Pulling back to
the Ladybird, the intelligent Troke pondered on the circumstance, and in
delivering his report to Vickers mentioned the strange cry he had heard
the night before. "It's my belief, sir, that he was trying to swim the
bay," he said. "He must ha' gone to the bottom anyhow, for he couldn't
swim five yards with them irons."

Vickers, busily engaged in getting under weigh, accepted this very
natural supposition without question. The prisoner had met his death
either by his own act, or by accident. It was either a suicide or an
attempt to escape, and the former conduct of Rufus Dawes rendered the
latter explanation a more probable one. In any case, he was dead. As Mr.
Troke rightly surmised, no man could swim the bay in irons; and when
the Ladybird, an hour later, passed the Grummet Rock, all on board her
believed that the corpse of its late occupant was lying beneath the
waves that seethed at its base.

CHAPTER VII. THE LAST OF MAC