White Sturgeon."

"What's the White Sturgeon?"

The deck hand looked at him queerly. "How long you been here, boy?"

"A couple of days."

"Well, that accounts for it. You see the White Sturgeon; you start prayin' right after. You'll need to. Nobody except that crazy Van Doorst has ever saw him an' lived to tell about it. Well, got to get to work."

The deck hand wandered away. Ramsay turned again to face the storm and let spray blow into his face. He thought of all that had happened since he had, at last, reached Lake Michigan. This Wisconsin country was indeed a land of sharp contrasts.

The Holter and the Spray. Captain Schultz and the deck hand. Devil Chad and Hans Van Doorst. A tannery and a fisherman. Local superstition about a white sturgeon. Ramsay knew a rising satisfaction. This semi-wilderness, lapped by a vast inland sea, might be a strange land, but nobody could say that it was not an interesting or a strong one. His last lingering doubts were set at rest and for the first time he was entirely satisfied because he had come. A strong country was always the place for strong people.

Ramsay raised his head, puzzled by something which, suddenly, seemed to be out of place. For a second he did not know what it was. Then he realized that the crying gulls which had been following the Holter in the hope that scraps or garbage would be tossed to them or else interested in whatever debris the side wheel might churn up, were no longer there.

Ramsay knew a second's uneasiness, and he could not explain it. He did not know why he missed the gulls. It was just that they and their crying had seemed a part of the lake. Now that they were gone, the lake was incomplete. The boy braced himself against a sudden, vicious burst of wind.

Even a land-lubber could tell that the storm's fury was increasing. A sharp patter of rain sliced like a shower of cold knives across the Holter's deck, and Ramsay ducked his head. He raised it again, grinning sheepishly as he did so, then gripped the rail to steady himself. He watched with much interest as the storm raged even more strongly.

It was driving directly out of the northwest, and it seemed to be perpetually re-born in the dark clouds that had possession of the sky. A howling wind accompanied it, and more shrapnel-bursts of rain.

The waves rose to prodigious heights. Dipping into them, the Holter seemed no more than a leaf on this tossing sea. Turning, Ramsay saw the helmsman clinging almost fiercely to his wheel, as though he would somehow soften the storm's rage by doing that. In his cage the little black horse nickered uncertainly.

Then there came something that was instantly apparent, even above the screaming wind. The rough rhythm of the Holter's throbbing engines seemed to halt. The ship shivered mightily, as though in pain.

The engines stopped.

CHAPTER TWO

WRECK

Shorn of her power, the Holter still followed her helmsman's course. But it became a listless, sluggish course. The ship was like a suddenly freed slave that does not know what to do with his own freedom.

For six years she had plodded Lake Michigan, always with the biggest possible paying load and always working at top speed. Many times she had groaned and protested, but she had been forced to obey the dictates of the engine that turned her side wheel. Now the engine, the tyrant, was dead from misuse of its own power. But without it the Holter had neither mind nor will of her own.

She smashed head-on into a mountainous wave that set her decks awash. For another moment or two she held her course, carried by her own momentum. Then, slowly and unwillingly, as though afraid to do such a thing and not trusting herself to do it, she swung broadside to the waves.

A muffled shout floated out of the engine room. Fat little Captain Schultz, a slicker covering his round body and anxiety written on his face, was peering down an opened hatch. Sluicing rain pelted the slicker and bounded off. Ramsay's eyes found the deck hand.

Eyes wide and mouth agape, he was standing near the wheelhouse. Naked terror was written on his face as he stared at something out in the lake. Ramsay followed his gaze.

To the starboard, the right side of the Holter, the lake seemed strangely calm. It was as though the wind and the storm did not strike with outrageous strength there, and oddly as if that part of the water might be commanded by some inexplicable force. Unable to tear his gaze away, expecting to see something special, Ramsay kept his eyes riveted on the calm water.

He saw a ripple, but not one born of storm and wind. There was something here that had nothing to do with the driving wind, or the cold rain, or even the tremendous waves. The deck hand covered his eyes with his hand.

At that instant, a great white apparition swam up through the water. It was a ghost, a creature of nightmares, a terrible thing seen only in terror-ridden moments. Ramsay controlled an impulse to shout or to flee. The thing came up to within inches of the surface and wallowed there like a greasy fat hog. Whitish-gray, rather than pure white, it flipped an enormous tail while it sported near the surface.

The thing, a fish, seemed fully nine feet long and possibly it carried a hundred pounds of weight for every foot. It bore no scales but seemed to be clothed in an overlapping series of armored plates. Its snout, pointed somewhat like a pig's, was tipped with barbels, or feelers. Dull eyes showed.

Again Ramsay controlled his fear. The thing, sober judgment told him, was nothing more or less than a great sturgeon, the mightiest fish of these inland waters. The fact that it was white, rather than the conventional gray-green or olive-green, was of no significance whatever. All living creatures, from elephants down to mice, occasionally produced an albino. It was not beyond reason that there could be an albino sturgeon.

Ramsay watched while it swam, and some semblance of cool control returned to his fevered imagination. This was no grotesque monster from another world. Telling himself again that it was nothing more or less than an unusual fish, he watched it sink back into the churning depths from which it had arisen. He put a shaking hand on the Holter's rail.

It was a fish and nothing else. None but superstitious people believed in superstition. Then the deck hand's terrified shriek rose above the keening wind.

"It's him! We seen it! The White Sturgeon! Gar-hhh!"

Mouth agape, the deck hand kept his eyes on that place where the White Sturgeon had disappeared. A great wave washed across the deck, and when it rolled away the deck hand was no longer visible. Ramsay shook his head to clear it and looked again at the place where the deck hand had been standing. Lake Michigan could swallow a man even easier than a pond swallowed a pebble, for there had not been even a ripple to mark the place where the deck hand had disappeared. There was not the slightest possibility of rescuing him. The deck hand had seen the White Sturgeon!

A battering ram of a wave crashed into the Holter's starboard side, and Ramsay felt a cold chill travel up and down his spine. Fear laid its icy fingers there, but he shook them off. The fact that the water had been calm when the White Sturgeon made its appearance and was angry now had nothing whatever to do with the fish. Rather, the calm water could be attributed to some quirk, some phenomenon inherent in the storm itself. Probably the White Sturgeon appeared because, for the moment, the lake had been calm. Knowing that, the big fish had nosed its way to the surface. Now that the lake was again storm-deviled, the White Sturgeon was gone.

Bracing himself against the wind, Ramsay made his way across the deck to the wheelhouse. He shivered, for the first time aware of the fact that his clothing was