now--would have the time of his young life."

"I don't think you need to worry about sending a message to Van Sluyd
yet awhile," the other answered; "after all, the _Miami_ is still above
water."

"She is, once in a while," Eric commented, as the cutter "took it green"
and the water came flooding down the deck. Homer, seeing the wave
coming, scuttled for the companion hatchway and went below.

As Eric had said, it seemed difficult to try to locate a derelict in a
half a gale of wind. Yet, so dangerous to navigation was the floating
wreck which the _Miami_ was seeking, that the risk was worth taking.
When he remembered what the lieutenant of the _Bear_ had said to him
once about derelicts, he realized the terrible importance of the quest.

"Every year," he had said, "hundreds of vessels, both sail and steam,
leave their home ports for foreign shores, or start from foreign ports
for home. The day of the expected arrival comes and goes, two or three
days drag by, and still there is no sign of them. Anxious relatives and
friends besiege the shipping offices daily for word, and no word comes.
When suspense has passed into assured disaster, the underwriters
inscribe against that vessel's name the one word, "Missing!" An average
of a vessel a day is the toll of the Seven Seas upon the world's
shipping. And the principal cause is--derelicts."

As the _Miami_ plowed her way through the water, dipping her nose into
the waves raised by a stiff southeaster, Eric thought of the suddenness
of the catastrophe if the Coast Guard cutter, in the darkness, should
strike one of those abandoned hulks, floating almost level with the
water, and scarcely visible from the vessel's decks.

It was a night calculated to shake the nerve of a youngster who knew
that this deadly menace to the life of every one on board might be
suddenly lurking in the trough of any one of the waves, that came
shouldering their vengeful resentment against the sturdy little vessel
that defied them. They had nourished their grudge against Man, the
violator of their ancient domain, over a thousand leagues of sea, for
the _Miami_ was a hundred miles to the eastward of the Lookout Shoal,
though westward of the limit of the Gulf Stream. The billows thus had a
stretch of unbroken ocean from the frozen continent of Antarctica. Of
this they made full use, and staunch little vessel though the cutter
was, she was making bad weather of it.

The fog was dense and the gale w