nose. The heat made his flesh pucker and tingle. His clothes stuck to him, sodden with sweat. The light of the blaze, fast brightening, showed scarlet through his close-drawn lids. Knife-like slivers, that sprang from the worn planks of the deck, scratched and gashed his arms, chest, and legs. So he went on, each inch a battle, each foot a campaign, mumbling curses at the pain, his mouth against the deck, his arms groping for some post or rod he knew, until it seemed he had gone the length of the steamer.

Of a sudden the bells rang again for engines, somewhere overhead; but whether the sound was to the left or right, before or behind, Egan could not decide.

He toiled a few feet farther; his hand touched an iron pipe running across-ship next the deck. The pipe was full of steam, hot, and it seared his hand; yet he did not curse this time. That pipe was the supply for the dynamo-engine: it told him his whereabouts. He had gone too far forward, and to the left. Twisting around, he sighted the four incandescents on the switchboard back of the dynamo-a row of mere yellow specks, though they were not five feet away. The levers and throttle stood on a small platform just in front of the switchboard.

Very slowly, toward that platform Egan wrenched his scorched, bleeding body, while the flames leaped yards to his inches, grappled the edge, and drew himself in a heap upon it. Slower yet he ran his right arm up the shipping-lever: the engines. were set to back, in obedience to the last order before the alarm. Unable to reach the bar's top, Egan tottered to his knees, clutched the latch, released it, and tugged to bring the lever over. It stuck, for some cause. Gaining his feet, he threw on his weight. The lever slipped forward with a jar. The strain over, Egan, unthinking, opened his mouth and drew in a great breath of smoke. Down he fell like a man shot, and lay there, just alive. The heat swept at him a shriveling gale, the platform was charring, but Egan did not mind much. His throat was swollen shut, his tongue lolling; he could scarcely breathe. He did not mind that, either. Somehow he was forgetting what he had come there for.

With a mad crash and rattle, the big bells- Barr's third despairing call-let loose square over Egan's head. It brought the weakening engineer up like the trumpet of judgment. Getting to his knees once more, he felt for the throttle-found it. Oiled a dozen times a day for a score of years, the steel wheel turned at his touch, as smooth as the stem-wind of a watch. Twice around he sharply whirled the throttle, waited a space, then spun it down like a top till the valve was wide open and the steam from four boilers was hurtling through ten-inch pipes to the cylinders.

Egan could not see the engines, but the spit of the steam around the pistons, the pound of the slide-valves, the rise and fall of the deck, told him they were moving.

Until then the fire had risen straight up; but now, spurred by the draft of the boat's movement, it came rushing astern, through the engine-room, like a whirlwind. But Egan, on his knees, his hands locked on the rim of the throttle, was dead a full minute before the flames reached him. He did not know when the Chippewa met the Minnesota bank, full speed, with a shock that ground her nose yards into the clay soil. He did not know when the steamer's company-not a life was lost save hisscrambled from the blistering decks to the soft, damp turf, while his racing engines held the boat fast against the shore.

V

THEY huddled on the beach, the Chippewa's passengers and crew, the mountains behind them as light as noonday in the fire-glow, an awed, silent crowd, shrinking from the heat, and watched their steamer rage into the night, a white-hot bonfire, the skeleton of her upper works slowly crumbling in the heart of it. And all the while, as they looked wondering on, the engines, slow to die, driving the great wheel dizzily around, lashed the shallows inshore to blood-red waves.

But not until an hour after, when Jo Black limped in at the tail of a party of rousters and brokenly told his story, did Travers and Barr and the others guess to whom they owed salvation.

T last McKiver's conscience began to annoy him. In other words, he had got enough. It occurred to him for the first time after a four-days drunk that he had a wife and child on the "Neck" who were anxiously waiting for him-anxious not so much for his affection, that lately, by the powerful alchemy of alcohol, had been transformed into cold brutality, but for that pittance without which they had hardly been able to support life. But McKiver's "trip" had disappeared. He had been paid off a hundred and five dollars as his share of a three-months fishing trip, and he had forty-two cents in his pocket. With a grunt he turned his face toward the ferry, and steered himself as well as he could down the narrow sidewalk. Every now and then he would luff up into the strong scent of a bar-room; then the jingle of the few cents he had remaining would remind him of duty and home, and harass him until he turned again upon his unsteady course.

It might have been a day in October instead of in January. Fairharbor was familiar with these exotic changes in the dead of winter. The children played in the streets, and dories dotted the harbor. Far out beyond the dangerous breakwater the sea seemed a cloth of blue velvet upon which motionless vessels were indolently etched. It was a languorous dream of summer, as much out of place on the bleak gray shore tinged with snow as Sarah Bernhardt would have been in Barnstable, or McKiver in a mosque in Jerusalem.

McKiver's huge form kept yawing toward the ferry. He was an Englishman who five years before had stepped from the deck

of a salt-steamer to the deck of a fisherman, and had exchanged a “lime-juicer's" life of starvation and safety for the fullbellied and hazardous existence of a "Grand Banker." Incidentally he had married a girl from down East somewhere, -he did not know just where,-who had waited on him in his boarding-house, and had been attracted to him by his brute size and surly masterfulness. After her fashion, Kate clung to her husband, and accepted his caresses and abuse as a legitimate part of the " for better" and " for worse" portion of the marriage fate, and was faithful to him. She had borne him a red-headed, freckle-faced baby, combining the marked characteristics of the two, and was prouder of the advent than he. Likewise, after his own fashion, Sandy cared for Kate. He had been too busy living to love. But Kate was sort of human Newfoundland, always fawning and ready

more of a convenience than a care. That is what a wife is liable to be to a fisherman who is away three quarters of the time and "found."

Now McKiver's brain, under the influence of the hot sun, began to thaw and clear. He pushed his sou'wester back, and unbuttoned his jacket. As the whisky sweated out, his responsibility to his family filtered into his heart. Why had he not gone straight home instead of allowing himself to be tolled up into a saloon? How long would the grocer and the butcher, the landlord and the milkman, support his wife and child for him? The last trip had been a failure, and he had solemnly promised Kate to bring the proceeds of this voyage right home. If he did not, she swore she would go home to her

mother and never see him again. Now he had been four days in the city, drunk, if not worse, robbed of all he possessed, and what of Kate? His coarse, mottled face took on a piteous expression in the bewilderment of his tardy remorse. He broke into a grotesque dog-trot as the double whistle of the fussy ferry announced its approach.

The tide was very low. Ten feet below the level of the wharf lay one of those fishing-schooners which an expert at a glance could see was a Georgiaman. Its decks bustled with the preparation of an early departure. McKiver stumbled down the gangway of the ferry-slip, and sat upon the low rail of the tug, under the stern of the fisherman. In a dazed way he read its name-Finance. Why, he knew her skip

per.

"Hullo, there, Finance!" he called gruffly from sheer habit. He was simply trying to drive Kate out of his mind.

A hollow-cheeked, winter-beaten countenance, surmounted by a prehistoric straw hat, peered down over the stern. There was an underpinning of gurry trousers tucked into rubber boots; the man was distinguished by a white shirt covered by an open green vest. His short sleeves were rolled up, showing bare, sinewy arms the muscles of which were now loose. They curved under the flesh like lanyards on the lee side of a vessel in a gale of wind. A recent shave had given this lank countenance the appearance of having been touched by hoar-frost. This effect was accentuated by lips chestnut with tobacco. It was the face of a human gull, and by the white shirt you might have known it belonged to the skipper of the Finance.

"Hullo, there-you-Noah Lufkin!” repeated McKiver, stupidly. "Wha' che doin' there?"

Noah Lufkin looked indulgently down at the drunkard. He knew McKiver's weakness and his strength. Sober, there was no better trawler in the fleet; a bit surly and overbearing, but to be depended upon when the hooks were heavy and the wind blew. The skipper spat unerringly at the screw of the tug, and opened his gaunt jaws.

"That ain't up to you, Sandy McKiver, what we 're doin' here. But I cal'late, if the ice gets down, that we'll be nigh up to Eastport by to-morrow this time

thet is, if it breezes up." He stopped and looked McKiver over critically. He detected the symptoms of the familiar debauch, and that state which vibrates between temporary sobriety and the freshet thirst eager to override the dam of re

morse.

"I say, Sandy," he droned dispassionately, "git off the Little Giant an' come with me this trip. I'm one man short, an' you've had enough booze for one while. Ye can't stand no more. You 're soaked now to the scuppers. Ye 'll share alike with the rest of us, an' be back in six weeks a new man with a hundred in your locker."

To the honor of the skipper, it must be said that Lufkin did not know that McKiver was a husband. In Fairharbor men are not rated as catchers of women, but as catchers of cod.

Now, to McKiver's sogged brain the skipper's invitation came like a warp to pull him out of the hell of shame into a Nirvana of forgetfulness, which, after all, is most men's idea of Paradise. If he did go home now, dead broke, Kate would only worry him like a rag, and he would break every bone in her body in return. How much easier to evade trouble and spurn responsibility! As for the baby, it had never yet called him father, and it was but a puppy to his memory. So Sandy eagerly rose to the bait, and managed to stumble up the ferry-slip and down the rigging into the hold of the Finance. In five minutes he was snoring in his bunk. In his maudlin, subconscious way, he had now managed to drop out of Fairharbor, for the time being, as completely as if he had been shanghaied off the wharf on a dark night.

And Noah Lufkin, thinking that he had done a philanthropic act all round, as soon as his latest haul was fast asleep, hurried ashore to his cousin the lumper, and purchased a mattress, oilskins, rubber boots, a heavy blanket, and a flannel shirt, in order that McKiver might not suffer too much from salt and cold. Nor did he forget to enter these items in a little coversoaked book. If Noah had known that there was a desperate woman haunting the purlieus of the city and the wharves for a lost husband, he would have trembled a little as he met a wild-eyed, hungry-looking, red-headed, disheveled creature (carrying a dirty, freckle-faced baby), sweeping