rger seas should roll her over and over to
destruction.

Already these larger seas were racing in from the open. To Carroll,
watching breathless and wide-eyed in that strange passive and receptive
state peculiar to imaginative natures, they seemed alive. And the
SPRITE, too, appeared to be, not a fabric and a mechanism controlled by
men, but a sentient creature struggling gallantly on her own volition.

Far out in the lake against the tumbling horizon she saw heave up for
a second the shoulder of a mighty wave. And instinctively she perceived
this wave as a deadly enemy of the little tug, and saw it bending all
its great energies to hurrying in on time to catch the victim before it
could escape. To this wave she gave all her attention, watching for
it after it had sunk momentarily below its fellows, recognising it
instantly as it rose again. The spasms of dismay and relief among the
crowd about her she did not share at all. The crises they indicated did
not exist for her. Until the wave came in, Carroll knew, the SPRITE,
no matter how battered and tossed, would be safe. Her whole being was
concentrated in a continually shifting calculation of the respective
distances between the tug and the piers, the tug and the relentlessly
advancing wave.

"Oh, go!" she exhorted the SPRITE under her breath.

Then the crowd, too, caught with its slower perceptions the import
of the wave. Carroll felt the electric thrill of apprehension shiver
through it. Huge and towering, green and flecked with foam the wave came
on now calmly and deliberately as though sure. The SPRITE was off the
end of the pier when the wave lifted her, just in the position her enemy
would have selected to crush her life out against the cribs. Slowly the
tug rose against its shoulder, was lifted onward, poised; and then
with a swift forward thrust the wave broke, smothering the pier and
lighthouse beneath tons of water.

A low, agonised wail broke from the crowd. And then--and then--over
beyond the pier down which the wave, broken and spent but formidable
still, was ripping its way, they saw gliding a battered black stack from
which still poured defiantly clouds of gray smoke.

For ten seconds the spectators could not believe their eyes. They had
distinctly seen the SPRITE caught between a resistless wall of water
and the pier; where she should have been crushed like the proverbial
egg-shell. Yet there she was--or her ghost.

Then a great cheer rose up aga