hawsers and life-lines, a solid net by the help of which his people could extend their efforts at salving the valuables from a fast-breaking vessel to the outermost rock of that dangerous archipelago, even at the height of a storm—with luck. In the past, even in his own time, several ships bound from Northern Europe for Quebec had been driven and dragged from their course, shattered upon those rocks, sucked off into deep water, and lost forever, without having contributed so much as a bale of sail-cloth to the people of Chance Along. He was determined that cases of this kind should not happen in the future. The net was to be so arranged that the greater part of it could be removed, and the balance submerged, with but slight effort, and later all returned to its working condition as easily; for it would not be well to draw the attention of outsiders to the contrivance. Wrecking, in those days, meant more than the salvage of cargoes, perhaps. The skipper hoped, in time (should the experiment prove successful at the mouth of the harbor), to rig the dangerous and productive archipelago off Squid Beach and Nolan's Cove with similar contrivances. There was not another man in Chance Along capable of conceiving such ideas; but Dennis was ambitious (in his crude way), imaginative, daring, unscrupulous and full of resources and energy.

All day the skipper and his men worked strenuously, and at break of dawn on the morrow they returned to their toils. By noon a gigantic iron hook, forged by the skipper himself, with a shank as thick as a strong man's arm and fully four feet long, had been set firmly in the face of the cliff. The skipper and five or six of his men stood at the edge of the barren, above the cliff and the harbor, wiping the sweat from their faces. Snow lay in patches over the bleak and sodden barren, a raw wind beat in from the east, and a gray and white sea snarled below.

"Boys," said the young skipper, "I's able to see ahead to the day whin there'll be no want in Chance Along, but the want we pretends to fool the world wid. Aye, ye may take Dennis Nolan's word for it! We'll eat an' drink full, lads, an' sleep warm as any marchant i' St. John's."

"What damn foolery has ye all bin at now?" inquired a sneering voice.

All turned and beheld Foxey Jack Quinn standing near at hand, a leer on his wide mouth and in his pale eyes, and his nunney-bag on his shoulder. His skinnywoppers (high-legged moccasins of sealskin, hair-side inward) were glistening with moisture of melted snow, and his face was red from the rasp of raw wind. He looked as if he had slept in his clothes—which was, undoubtedly, the case. He glared straight at the skipper with a dancing flame of devilment in his eyes.

"What ye bin all a-doin' now for to make extry work for yerselves?" he asked.

There followed a brief silence, and then Black Dennis Nolan spoke quietly.

"Why bain't ye over to Squid Beach, standin' yer trick at look-out?" he inquired.

Foxey Jack's answer was a harsh, jeering laugh, and words to the effect that life was too short to spend five days of it lonely and starving with cold, in a hut not fit for a pig.

"Ye kin do what ye likes, yerself—ye an' them as be fools like yerself; but Jack Quinn bain't a-goin' to lend a hand a yer foolishness, Denny Nolan," he concluded.

"Turn round an' git back to yer post wid ye," said the skipper.

"Who be ye, an' what be ye, to give that word to me?"

"Ye knows who I be. Turn round an' git!"

"To hell wid ye! I turns round for no man!"

"Then ye'd best drop yer nunney-bag, ye foxey-headed fool, for I bes a-comin' at ye to larn ye who bes skipper here."

Quinn let his nunney-bag fall to the snow behind him—and in the same instant of time the skipper's right fist landed on his nose, knocking him backward over the bag, clear off his feet, and staining his red whiskers to a deeper and brighter red. But the big fellow came up to his feet again as nimbly as a cat. For a moment the two clinched and swayed in each other's straining arms, like drunken men. The awed spectators formed a line between the two and the edge of the cliff. Foxey Jack broke the hold, leaped back and struck a furious, but ill-judged blow which glanced off the other's jaw. Next instant he was down on the snow again, with one eye shut, but up again as quickly.

Again they clinched and swayed, breast to breast, knee to knee. Both were large men; but Foxey Jack was heavier, having come to his full weight. This time it was the skipper who tried to break the hold, realizing that his advantage lay in his fists, and Quinn's in the greater weight of body and greater strength of back and leg. So the skipper twisted and pulled; but Quinn held tight, and slowly but surely forced the younger man towards the edge of the cliff. Suddenly the skipper drew his head back and brought it forward and downward again, with all the force of his neck and shoulders, fair upon the bridge of his antagonist's nose. Quinn staggered and for a second his muscles relaxed; and in that second the skipper wrenched away from his grasp and knocked him senseless to the ground.

"Lay there, ye scum!" cried Black Dennis Nolan, breathing heavily, and wiping blood from his chin with the back of his hand. "Lay there an' be damned to ye, if ye t'ink ye kin say 'nay' when Dennis Nolan says 'aye.' If it didn't be for the childern ye bes father of, an' yer poor, dacent woman, I'd t'row ye over the cliff."

Foxey Jack Quinn was in no condition to reply to the skipper's address. In fact, he did not hear a word of it. Two of the men picked him up and carried him down a steep and twisting path to his cabin at the back of the harbor, above the green water and the gray drying-stages, and beneath the edge of the vast and empty barren. He opened one eye as they laid him on the bed in the one room of the cabin. He glared up at the two men and then around at his horrified wife and children.

"Folks," said he, "I'll be sure the death o' Black Dennis Nolan. Aye, so help me Saint Peter. I'll send 'im to hell, all suddent un' unready, for the black deed he done this day!"

That was the first time the skipper showed the weight of his fist. His followers were impressed by the exhibition. The work went steadily on among the rocks in front of Chance Along for ten days, and then came twenty-four hours of furious wind and driving snow out of the northwest. This was followed by a brief lull, a biting nip of frost that registered thirty degrees below zero, and then fog and wind out of the east. After the snowy gale, during the day of still, bitter cold, relief parties went to Squid Beach and Nolan's Cove and brought in the half-frozen watchers. For a day the look-out stations were deserted, the people finding it all they could do to keep from freezing in their sheltered cabins in Chance Along; but with the coming of the east wind and the fog, the huts of sods were again occupied.

The fog rolled in about an hour before noon; and shortly after midnight the man from Nolan's Cove groped his way along the edge of the cliff, down the twisty path to the cluster of cabins, and to Black Dennis Nolan's door. He pounded and kicked the door until the whole building trembled.

"What bes ye a-wantin' now?" bawled the skipper, from within.

"I seed a blue flare an' heared a gun a-firing to the sou'east o' the cove," bawled the visitor, in reply.

The skipper opened the door.

"Come in, lad! Come in!" he cried.

He lit a candle and set to work swiftly pulling on his outer clothes and sea-boots.

"There bes rum an' a mug, Pat. Help yerself an' then rouse the men," he said. "Tell Nick Terry an' Bill Brennen to get the gear together. Step lively! Rouse 'em out!"

Pat Lynch slopped rum into a tin mug, gulped it greedily, and stumbled from the candle-light out again to the choking fog. He would have liked to remain inside long enough to swallow