go stark, staring mad if we can't find out
something!"

More to keep things from going from bad to worse than for any other
reason, Prime suggested a walk in the opposite direction--southward from
the breakfast camp. While they were still within sight of the ashes of
the breakfast fire they made a discovery. The loose beach sand was
tracked back and forth, and in one place there were scorings as if some
heavy body had been dragged. Just beyond the footprints there were wheel
tracks, beginning abruptly and ending in the same manner a hundred yards
farther along. The wheel tracks were parallel but widely separated,
ill-defined in the loose sand but easily traceable.

"A wagon?" questioned the young woman.

"No," said Prime soberly; "it was--er--it looks as if it might have been
an aeroplane."

II

AMATEUR CASTAWAYS

LUCETTA MILLINGTON--she had told Prime her name on the tramp to the
northward--sat down in the sand, elbows on knees and her chin propped in
her hands.

"You say 'aeroplane' as if it suggested something familiar to you, Mr.
Prime," she prompted.

Truly it did suggest something to Prime, and for a moment his mouth went
dry. Grider, the man he was to have met in Quebec, was a college
classmate, a harebrained young barbarian, rich, an outdoor fanatic, an
owner of fast yachts, a driver of fast cars, and latterly a dabbler in
aviatics. Idle enough to be full of extravagant fads and fancies, and
wealthy enough to indulge them, this young barbarian made friends of his
enemies and enemies of his friends with equal facility--the latter
chiefly through the medium of conscienceless practical jokes evolved
from a Homeric sense of humor too ruthless to be appreciated by mere
twentieth-century weaklings.

Prime had more than once been the good-natured victim of these jokes,
and his heart sank within him. It was plain now that they had both been
conveyed to this outlandish wilderness in an aircraft of some sort, and
there was little doubt in his mind that Grider had been at the controls.

"It's a--it's a joke, just as I have been trying to tell you," he
faltered at length. "We have been kidnapped, and I'm awfully afraid I
know the man who did it," and thereupon he gave her a rapid-fire sketch
of Grider and Grider's wholly barbarous and irresponsible proclivities.

Miss Millington heard him through without comment, still with her chin
in her