eries of stabbing pains in his lacerated face. But he
was of the sea, of that breed which survives by dint of fortitude,
endurance, stoutness of arm and quickness of wit. He clawed to his feet.
Almost before him lifted the bleak southern face of Squitty Island.
Point Old jutted out like a barrier. MacRae swung on the tiller. But the
wind had the mainsail in its teeth. Without control of that boom his
rudder could not serve him.

And as he crawled forward to try to lower sail, or get a rope's end on
the boom, whichever would do, the sloop struck on a rock that stands
awash at half-tide, a brown hummock of granite lifting out of the sea
two hundred feet off the tip of Point Old.

She struck with a shock that sent MacRae sprawling, arrested full in an
eight-knot stride. As she hung shuddering on the rock, impaled by a
jagged tooth, a sea lifted over her stern and swept her like a watery
broom that washed MacRae off the cabin top, off the rock itself into
deep water beyond.

He came up gasping. The cool immersion had astonishingly revived him. He
felt a renewal of his strength, and he had been cast by luck into a
place from which it took no more than the moderate effort of an able
swimmer to reach shore. Point Old stood at an angle to the smashing
seas, making a sheltered bight behind it, and into this bight the
flooding tide set in a slow eddy. MacRae had only to keep himself
afloat.

In five minutes his feet touched on a gravel beach. He walked dripping
out of the languid swell that ran from the turbulence outside and turned
to look back. The sloop had lodged on the rock, bilged by the ragged
granite. The mast was down, mast and sodden sails swinging at the end of
a stay as each sea swept over the rock with a hissing roar.

MacRae climbed to higher ground. He sat down beside a stunted, leaning
fir and watched his boat go. It was soon done. A bigger sea than most
tore the battered hull loose, lifted it high, let it drop. The crack of
breaking timbers cut through the boom of the surf. The next sea swept
the rock clear, and the broken, twisted hull floated awash. Caught in
the tidal eddy it began its slow journey to join the vast accumulation
of driftwood on the beach.

MacRae glanced along the island shore. He knew that shore slightly,--a
bald, cliffy stretch notched with rocky pockets in which the surf beat
itself into dirty foam. If he had grounded anywhere in that mile of
headland north of Point Old, his bones wou