the same time some one made the loosened sheet taut, the canvas caught the gust and the craft gained sufficient headway to enable her [pg 35]to run over, and not be run down by the seas. As she careened and plunged, racing down a frothing dark billow, the convict, relieved of his burden, clung to the lower gunwale. By a desperate effort he drew himself up, when a face vaguely remembered--as part of a bad dream--looked into his, with a dash of surprise. [pg 35] "Eh?--Gimme a hand--" The asked-for hand swept suddenly under the one grasping the side of the boat, and shot up sharply. In the darkness and confusion no one saw the act. The convict disappeared, but his half-articulate curses followed. "The fellow's let go," muttered Lord Ronsdale with a shiver. At the steering oar the chief mate, hearing the cries of the man, cast a swift glance over his shoulder and hesitated. To bring the boat, half-filled with water, around now, meant inevitable disaster; one experiment of the sort had well-nigh ended in their all being drowned. He knew he was personally responsible for the lives in his charge; and with but an instant in which to decide, he declined to repeat the risk. [pg 36]"He's probably gone by this time, anyhow," he told himself, and drove on. [pg 36] The convict, however, was not yet quite "gone"; as the boat receded rapidly from view, becoming smaller and smaller, he continued mechanically to use his arms. But he had as little heart as little strength to go on with the uneven contest. "He's done me! done me!" he repeated to himself. "And I ain't never goin' to git a chance to fix him," he thought, and looked despairingly at the sky. The dark rushing clouds looked like black demons; the stars they uncovered were bright gleaming dagger points. "Ain't never!--the slob!" And with a flood of almost sobbing invective he let himself go. But as the waters closed over him and he sank, his hand, reaching blindly out to grip in imagination the foe, touched something round--like a serpent, or an eel. His fingers closed about it--it proved to be a line; he drew himself along, and to his surprise found himself again on the surface, and near a great fragment of wreckage. This he might have discovered [pg 37]earlier, but for the anger and hatred that had blinded him to all save the
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