ue eyes having a touch of steely
gray in their blue depths, and he was unmistakably of that fair type
which runs to sandy hair and freckles. He was dressed in a light-colored
shirt, blue serge trousers, canvas shoes; his shirt sleeves, rolled to
the elbows, bared flat, sinewy forearms.

He turned his head to look back to where in the distance a white speck
showed far astern, and his eyes narrowed and clouded. But there was no
cloud in them when he turned again to his companion, a girl sitting on
a box just outside the radius of the tiller. She was an odd-looking
figure to be sitting in the cockpit of a fishing boat, amid recent
traces of business with salmon, codfish, and the like. The heat was
putting a point on the smell of defunct fish. The dried scales of them
still clung to the small vessel's timbers. In keeping, the girl should
have been buxom, red-handed, coarsely healthy. And she was anything but
that. No frail, delicate creature, mind you,--but she did not belong in
a fishing boat. She looked the lady, carried herself like
one,--patrician from the top of her russet-crowned head to the tips of
her white kid slippers. Yet her eyes, when she lifted them to the man at
the tiller, glowed with something warm. She stood up and slipped a
silk-draped arm through his. He smiled down at her, a tender smile
tempered with uneasiness, and then bent his head and kissed her.

"Do you think they will overtake us, Donald?" she asked at length.

"That depends on the wind," he answered. "If these light airs hold they
_may_ overhaul us, because they can spread so much more cloth. But if
the westerly freshens--and it nearly always does in the afternoon--I can
outsail the _Gull_. I can drive this old tub full sail in a blow that
will make the _Gull_ tie in her last reef."

"I don't like it when it's rough," the girl said wistfully. "But I'll
pray for a blow this afternoon."

If indeed she prayed--and her attitude was scarcely prayerful, for it
consisted of sitting with one hand clasped tight in her lover's--her
prayer fell dully on the ears of the wind god. The light airs fluttered
gently off the bluish haze of Vancouver Island, wavered across the
Gulf, kept the sloop moving, but no more. Sixty miles away the mouth of
the Fraser opened to them what security they desired. But behind them
power and authority crept up apace. In two hours they could distinguish
clearly the rig of the pursuing yacht. In another hour she was less than