shift full half the compass. A southeast wind
came backing up against the westerly. There was in its breath a hint of
something stronger.

Masterless, the sloop sailed, laid to, started off again erratically,
and after many shifts ran off before this stiffer wind. Unhelmed, she
laid her blunt bows straight for the opening between Sangster and
Squitty islands. On the cockpit floor Donald MacRae sprawled unheeding.
Blood from his broken face oozed over the boards.

Above him the boom swung creaking and he did not hear. Out of the
southeast a bank of cloud crept up to obscure the sun. Far southward the
Gulf was darkened, and across that darkened area specks and splashes of
white began to show and disappear. The hot air grew strangely cool. The
swell that runs far before a Gulf southeaster began to roll the sloop,
abandoned to all the aimless movements of a vessel uncontrolled. She
came up into the wind and went off before it again, her sails bellying
strongly, racing as if to outrun the swells which now here and there
lifted and broke. She dropped into a hollow, a following sea slewed her
stern sharply, and she jibed,--that is, the wind caught the mainsail and
flung it violently from port to starboard. The boom swept an arc of a
hundred degrees and put her rail under when it brought up with a jerk on
the sheet.

Ten minutes later she jibed again. This time the mainsheet parted. Only
stout, heavily ironed backstays kept mainsail and boom from being blown
straight ahead. The boom end swung outboard till it dragged in the seas
as she rolled. Only by a miracle and the stoutest of standing gear had
she escaped dismasting. Now, with the mainsail broaded off to starboard,
and the jib by some freak of wind and sea winged out to port, the sloop
drove straight before the wind, holding as true a course as if the limp
body on the cockpit floor laid an invisible, controlling hand on sheet
and tiller.

And he, while that fair wind grew to a yachtsman's gale and lashed the
Gulf of Georgia into petty convulsions, lay where he had fallen, his
head rolling as his vessel rolled, heedless when she rose and raced on a
wave-crest or fell laboring in the trough when a wave slid out from
under her.

The sloop had all but doubled on her course,--nearly but not
quite,--and the few points north of west that she shifted bore her
straight to destruction.

MacRae opened his eyes at last. He was bewildered and sick. His head
swam. There was a s