t have touched it by stretching out his arm. Then she
straightened out like a greyhound on a long course across the placid
silver reaches to a goal as yet invisible.

Iff returned to the younger man's side.

"Twenty miles an hour, Bascom claims," he shouted. "At that rate we
ought to be there in about fifteen minutes now."

Staff nodded, wondering what they would find on Wreck Island, bitterly
repenting the oversight which had resulted in Ismay's escape from his
grasp. If only he had not been so sure of his conquest of the little
criminal ...! Now his mind crawled with apprehensions bred of his
knowledge of the man's amazing fund of resource. He who outwitted Ismay
would have earned the right to plume himself upon his cunning....

When he looked up from his abstraction, the loom of the mainland was
seemingly very distant. The motor-boat was nearing the centre of a deep
indentation in the littoral. And suddenly it was as though they did not
move at all, as if all this noise and labour went for nothing, as if the
boat were chained to the centre of a spreading disk of silver,
world-wide, illimitable, and made no progress for all its thrashing and
its fury.

Only the unending sweep of wind across his face denied that effect....

Iff touched his arm.

"There...." he said, pointing.

Over the bows a dark mass seemed to have separated itself from the
shadowed mainland, with which it had till then been merged. A strip of
silver lay between the two, and while they watched it widened, swiftly
winning breadth and bulk as the motor-boat swung to the north of the
long, sandy spit at the western end of Wreck Island.

"See anything of another boat?" Iff asked. "You look--your eyes are
younger than mine."

Staff stood up, steadying himself with feet wide apart, and stared
beneath his hand.

"No," he said; "I see no boat."

"We've beaten him, then!" Iff declared joyfully.

But they hadn't, nor were they long in finding it out. For presently the
little island lay black, a ragged shadow against the blue-grey sky, upon
the starboard beam; and Bascom passed the word aft to shut off the
motor. As its voice ceased, the boat shot in toward the land, and the
long thin moonlit line of the landing-stage detached itself from the
general obscurity and ran out to meet them. And so closely had Bascom
calculated that the "shoot" of the boat brought them to a standstill at
the end of the structure without a jar. Bascom jumped out with t