ll three now
found their teeth chattering.

"Say, it begins to look like a crazy undertaking," declared Hank, with
blunt candor. "Can we possibly make it?"

"We've got to," retorted Tom Halstead, his will power unshaken.

"I don't see the light over there any more," observed Hank, speaking
the words in jerks of one syllable, so intense was the shaking of his
jaws.

"Maybe the boat isn't over yonder any longer," admitted Captain Tom,
"but we've got to chance it. And say, we'd better shove off and try to
swim again, to warm ourselves up. We're in danger of shaking ourselves
plum to pieces."

There was another great peril, on which none of them had calculated
well enough before starting. When they were clear of the log,
swimming, it pitched so on the tops of the waves that it was likely,
at any instant, to drive against the head of one of the swimmers and
crack his skull.

"If we had known all this before we started----" began Hank, the next
time the three swimmers were driven to cling, briefly, to their
movable buoy.

"We'd have started just the same," retorted Tom, as stiffly as his
chattering teeth would let him speak.

"Humph!" muttered Hank, unbelievingly. "It's a fool's dream, this kind
of a swim."

"It's less work to go ahead than to turn back, now," broke in Joe, his
teeth accompanying his words with the clatter of castanets.

"No; the wind and tide would be with us going back," objected Butts.
"We could almost drift back."

"And die of chills on the way," contended Tom, doggedly. "No, sir!
We've got to go ahead. I'm swimming to the tune of thoughts of the
galley fire aboard the 'Restless'!"

"Br-r-r!" shook Hank, as the three cast loose from the log once more
and struck out, panting, yet too cold to stay idle any longer.

It was tantalizing enough. The longer they swam, the more the boys
began to believe that the island they sought was retreating from
before them. Hank was almost certain they were moving in a circle,
but Halstead, with a keen sense of location, insisted that they were
going straight, even if very slowly, to the nameless island.

"I see it," breathed the young skipper, exultantly, at last.

"What--the island?" bellowed Hank Butts.

"No; but I'd swear I saw the 'Restless' the last time we rode a high
wave," Halstead shouted back.

Ten minutes afterwards all three of the Motor Boat Club boys caught
occasional glimpses of something dark and vague that they believed to
be the hu