t. No sound answered
him but the cheerless bubbling of the broken water ahead.

He looked down again at his friend, and saw the dark figure of Midwinter
rise erect, and pace the deck backward and forward, never disappearing
out of sight of the cabin when it retired toward the bows of the wreck,
and never passing beyond the cabin when it returned toward the stern.
"He is impatient to get away," thought Allan; "I'll try again." He
hailed the land once more, and, taught by previous experience, pitched
his voice in its highest key.

This time another sound than the sound of the bubbling water answered
him. The lowing of frightened cattle rose from the building in the
grassy hollow, and traveled far and drearily through the stillness
of the morning air. Allan waited and listened. If the building was a
farmhouse the disturbance among the beasts would rouse the men. If it
was only a cattle-stable, nothing more would happen. The lowing of
the frightened brutes rose and fell drearily, the minutes passed, and
nothing happened.

"Once more!" said Allan, looking down at the restless figure pacing
beneath him. For the third time he hailed the land. For the third time
he waited and listened.

In a pause of silence among the cattle, he heard behind him, on the
opposite shore of the channel, faint and far among the solitudes of the
Islet of the Calf, a sharp, sudden sound, like the distant clash of a
heavy door-bolt drawn back. Turning at once in the new direction, he
strained his eyes to look for a house. The last faint rays of the
waning moonlight trembled here and there on the higher rocks, and on the
steeper pinnacles of ground, but great strips of darkness lay dense
and black over all the land between; and in that darkness the house, if
house there were, was lost to view.

"I have roused somebody at last," Allan called out, encouragingly, to
Midwinter, still walking to and fro on the deck, strangely indifferent
to all that was passing above and beyond him. "Look out for the
answering, hail!" And with his face set toward the islet, Allan shouted
for help.

The shout was not answered, but mimicked with a shrill, shrieking
derision, with wilder and wilder cries, rising out of the deep distant
darkness, and mingling horribly the expression of a human voice with the
sound of a brute's. A sudden suspicion crossed Allan's mind, which
made his head swim and turned his hand cold as it held the rigging. In
breathless silence he look