ed another brace of
decoys, when a violent gale caught him broadside, almost capsizing him.

"If I don't get those decoys now I never shall!" he muttered, doggedly
jabbing about with extended oar. But he never got them; for at that
moment a tropical hurricane, still in its infancy, began to develop, and
when, blinded with spray, he managed to jam the oars into the oar-locks,
his boat was half a mile out and still driving.

For a week the wind had piled the lagoons and lakes south of the
Matanzas full of water, and now the waves sprang up, bursting into
menacing shapes, knocking the boat about viciously. Haltren turned his
unquiet eyes towards a streak of green water ahead.

"I don't suppose this catspaw is really trying to drive me out of
Coquina Inlet!" he said, peevishly; "I don't suppose I'm being blown out
to sea."

It was a stormy end for a day's pleasure--yet curiously appropriate,
too, for it was the fourth anniversary of his wedding-day; and the storm
that followed had blown him out into the waste corners of the world.

Perhaps something of this idea came into his head; he laughed a
disagreeable laugh and fell to rowing.

The red lightning still darted along the southern horizon, no nearer;
the wilderness of water, of palm forests, of jungle, of dune, was bathed
in a sickly light; overhead oceans of clouds tore through a sombre sky.

After a while he understood that he was making no headway; then he saw
that the storm was shaping his course. He dug his oars into the thick,
gray waves; the wind tore the cap from his head, caught the boat and
wrestled with it.

Somehow or other he must get the boat ashore before he came abreast of
the inlet; otherwise--

He turned his head and stared at the whitecaps tumbling along the deadly
raceway; and he almost dropped his oars in astonishment to see a
gasoline-launch battling for safety just north of the storm-swept
channel. What was a launch doing in this forsaken end of the earth? And
the next instant developed the answer. Out at sea, beyond the outer bar,
a yacht, wallowing like a white whale, was staggering towards the open
ocean.

He saw all this in a flash--saw the gray-green maelstrom between the
dunes, the launch struggling across the inlet, the yacht plunging
seaward. Then in the endless palm forests the roar deepened. Flash!
Bang! lightning and thunder were simultaneous.

"That's better," said Haltren, hanging to his oars; "there's a fighting
chance no