e, and
Sergeant Treacher bow. The Commandant steered, his lantern and pocket
compass beside him in the stern sheets.

The boat--she had once been a yacht's cutter--measured sixteen feet
over all. She was fitted with a small centre-plate, and carried a lug
sail (but this they left behind; it was in store, and would have been
worse than useless). They pulled out into a fog so thick that only by
intervals could the Commandant catch sight of Sergeant Treacher's face,
and Sergeant Treacher's eyebrows and sandy moustache glistering with
beads of mist.

They had left the pier but a short two hundred strokes behind them when
the little tug belonging to the Islands came panting out of the harbour
with the lifeboat in tow, and passed on, blowing her whistle, to
overtake and pick up the coastguard galley. So unexpectedly her lights
sprang upon them, and so close astern that Treacher, with a sharp cry
of warning--for the Commandant's gaze was fastened forward--had barely
time to jerk the boat's head round and avoid being cut down. Then,
dropping his paddle, he made a grab at the painter and flung it,
calling out to the lifeboat's crew to catch and make fast. But either
he was a moment too late in flinging, or the lifeboatmen, themselves
bawling instructions to the tug's crew, were preoccupied and did not
hear. The rope struck against something--the lifeboat's gunwale
doubtless--but no one caught it, and next moment the tug had slipped
away into darkness and into a silence which swallowed up the shouts and
the throb of her engines as though she had dropped into a pit.

"Darn your skin, Sam Treacher!" swore Sergeant Archelaus. "There goes a
couple of hours' pulling you might have saved us!"

"Then why couldn't you have given warning?" retorted Treacher. "Pretty
pair of eyes you keep in that old head of yours!"

"Be quiet, you two!" the Commandant ordered. "They'd have caught the
painter if they wanted us."

He fell silent, bending his head to study the compass in the lantern's
ray. "Not wanted"--"not wanted"--the paddles took up the burden and
beat it into a sort of tune to the creak of the thole-pins. As a young
officer he had started with high notions of duty; nor, looking back on
the wasted years could he tax himself that he had ever declined its
call; only the call which in youth had always carried a promise with
it, definitely clear and shining, of enterprise and reward, of
adventure, achievement, fame, had sunk by degree