already settling himself down for the night and Harrison
Smith smote him boisterously on the back.

"A red hot scent, my son," said he. "We're on the winning side.
Success, my boy--success."

Freddie Dirk smiled beatifically through a fog of beer.

"Goo' ni'," he murmured.

"It's up with the dawn for you and me--and then success."

Curious how success reacts even on the best balanced brain and
obliterates the most obvious considerations. Harrison Smith entirely
forgot the second blue dot on the map--the one situated a mile outside
the village where a little footpath converged with the high road.

CHAPTER 22.

PLAIN SAILING.

The steam trawler "Felice" out of Cherbourg was not much to look at,
but none the less she was a lady of virtue and of good intention. Her
engines had lost the sweet voice of youth through long argument and
bitter contest with the stern affronts of life. Where once they had
hummed and purred now they racketed and nagged, but they got through
the work none the less well on that account. The life of a fish wife
hardens the temperament and loosens the tongue and the "Felice" was no
exception to the rule. A plain, strident, powerful old woman bucketing
through calm and trouble with the same reproach for either. The
"Felice" wore rusty black--coarse and patched. She had long ago
forsaken her girlish waist band of royal blue esteeming such fallals
better suited to the children of the fleet. She was a no-nonsense
lady, one of the "up and doing and you be damned" sort, but she boasted
at least one unusual feature, the pride and envy of her fellows. She
was fitted with an aerial, the relic of an age when small vessels went
forth to sweep up big mines very often to be swept up themselves while
so engaged and to mention the fact by wireless in the short interval
between being struck and sinking.

Anthony Barraclough, wrapped in a suit of borrowed oilskins, leaned
against the deck-house and grinned at the breaking day. Like a fire
opal the sun rose out of the sea, its first rays dissipating the
ghostlike wisps of fog that drifted over the water. The "Felice" was
shouldering her way up channel against the slap of a running tide and
the greeny-black waves, as yet undyed by the morning blue, spumed and
spattered over the bows and wetted her decks with a sharp salt rain.

"Oh, Lord!" said Barraclough, dashing the spray out of his eyes. "Oh,
Lord! it's good to be alive."

His hand t