night, and it kind of
crippled us," he said. "Twice the boat nearly went back again in the
surf, and I don't quite know how we pulled her off. Anyway, one of us
was busy heaving out the water that broke into her. It was Jake, I
think, and he seemed kind of silly. Once we saw a boat hove up on a sea,
but we lost her in the spray, and a long while after we saw the
schooner. Just then a comber that broke on board 'most hove us over, and
when we had dodged the next two there wasn't a sign of the schooner.
After that we knew that we were done, and we just tried to keep her
head-to and ease her to the seas."

He stopped a moment, and looked around at the others with troubled eyes,
as if trying to marshal uncertain memories. He was a simple sailorman,
who contented himself with the baldest narrative; still, two of those
who heard him could fill in the things he had not mentioned--the mad
lurching of the half-swamped boat, the tense struggle with the oars each
time a big frothing comber forged out of the darkness, and the savage
desperation of the drenched and half-frozen men cast away with the
roaring surf to lee of them and their enemies watching upon the hammered
beach.

"It blew hard that night," he continued. "Somehow our little boat lived
through it, but there wasn't a sign of the island when morning
came--nothing but the combers and the flying haze! Guess the wind must
have shifted a few points and drove us by the end of it. Then we found
Jake had his head laid open by a sealing club. The sea was getting
longer, and as we were too played out to hold the boat to it we got her
away before it, and somehow she didn't roll over. I think it was next
day, though it might have been longer, when we fetched another island.
She just washed up on it, and one of the others pulled me out. There
wasn't a sign of anybody on the beach, but there were plenty of skinned
holluschickie seals on the slope behind it, and that was fortunate for
us."

"You struck nobody on the island?" questioned Wyllard.

"We didn't," Lewson answered simply. "The Russians must have sent a
vessel to take off the killers after the last drive of the season a day
or two before, for the holluschickie were quite fresh. It was blowing
hard and the surf was getting steep, and the men had left quite a few of
their things behind them. We found the shacks that the killers lived in,
and we made out that winter in one of them."

It occurred to Wyllard that this was a