his
face.

"Skipper says," he shouted, "that the point you gave me is the exact
location of the island shown on that ancient map and that we must be
about ten knots to the north of it. When I told him that the boys were
in a seaplane at that point, he suddenly became convinced that there
must be an island out there somewhere and refused to change his course.

"'For,' he says, 'if they've been sending messages from a plane in a
gale like this they must be on the ground to do it and if on the ground,
where but on an island? And if there's an island, how are we going to
get up to her in the storm that's about to hit us. We'll be piled on the
rocks and smashed in pieces.' That's what he said; said we'd be much
safer in the open sea."

Curlie stared at the floor. His mind was in a whirl. Here he had been
about to furnish proof that the mysterious island did not exist and just
at that instant there came floating in from the air proof of the
island's actual existence, proof so strong that even a seasoned old salt
believed it and refused to change his course. What was he to say to
that!

Fortunately, or unfortunately, he was to be given time enough to think
about it, for at that moment, with an unbelievable violence the storm
broke.

As they felt the impact of it, it was as if the staunch little craft had
run head on into one of those steel nets used during the war for
trapping submarines. She struck it and from the very force of the blow,
recoiled. The thing she had struck, however, was not a steel net but a
mountain of waters flanked by such a volume of wind as is seldom seen on
the Atlantic.

"It's the end of the _Kittlewake_," thought Curlie. "You take care of
her," he shouted in Joe's ear, at the same time jerking his thumb at
Gladys. The next second he disappeared into the storm.

CHAPTER XX

A SEA ABOVE A SEA

When Alfred Brightwood had tilted the nose of the _Stormy Petrel_ upward
and away from the threatening bank of clouds she rose rapidly. A
thousand, two thousand, three, four, five thousand feet she mounted to
dizzy heights above the sea.

As they mounted, the stars, swinging about in the sky, like incandescent
bulbs strung on a wire, made their appearance here and there. They came
out rapidly, by twos and threes, by scores and hundreds. In clusters and
fantastic figures they swam about in the purple night.

Almost instantly the sea disappeared from beneath them and in its place
came a new se