guess. Though there’s a rise and fall on the island beach, the stream ran steady to the northeast at about two miles an hour, the whole week we lay sheltering in the bight, and the swell it brings in makes a curling sea on the edge of the shoals.”

“Doesn’t seem a nice place for a diving job. How did you get down to her?”

“Stripped and swam down. One day when it fell a flat calm for a few hours and Jake was busy patching the sail, I pulled the dory across. I wanted to find out what those timbers belonged to, and I knew I had to do it then, because the ice was coming in, and we must clear with the first fair wind. Well, I got a turn of the dory’s painter round a timber, and went down twice, seeing bottom at about three fathoms with the water pretty clear. The sand was well up her bilge, but she was holding together, and when I swam round to the open end of her there didn’t seem much in the way except the orlop beams. I could have walked right aft under decks if I’d had a diving dress; but I’d been in the water long enough, and a sea fog was creeping up.”

Moran apparently thought little of his exploit; but Jimmy could appreciate the hardihood he had shown. The wreck lay far up on the northern coast, where the sea was chilled by currents from the Pole, and Moran had gone down to her when the ice was working in. Jimmy could imagine the tiny dory lurching over the broken swell, and the half-frozen man painfully crawling on board her with many precautions to avoid a capsize, while the fog that might prevent his return to his vessel crept across the water. It was an adventure that required unusual strength and courage.

“Why didn’t you take your partner out with you?” he asked.

“I’d seen Jake play some low-down tricks when we traded for the few furs we got, and I suspicioned he wasn’t acting square with me. Anyhow, he allowed he didn’t take much count of abandoned wrecks, and when he saw I’d brought nothing back, he never asked me about her.”

“But if she was lost on the reef, how did she reach the bank a mile away?”

“I can’t tell you that, but I guess she shook her engines out after she broke her back, and then slipped off into deeper water. The stream and surge of sea may have worked her along the bottom.”

“It came out that she had only a little rock ballast in her,” Bethune explained. “There may not have been enough to pin her down; but the important point is that the strong-room 

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