Philip came back to the helm. "Well," he said, "it looks like Seattle to-night, after all; dinner, perhaps, at the Arlington."
But Stratton, looking in his companion's face, started a little, and with his hand still on the tiller, swung the _Phantom_ slowly around, shaping a course for Victoria.
They did not dine in Seattle that night, but the next evening found them at _table d'hote_ in the English city. Later, in the long northern twilight, the little yacht crept out of the winding harbor and coasted the island northward to an obscure, forest-girt cove, where she came to anchor.
An hour after the _Phantom_ left her moorings in Victoria harbor, Bates, of the United States Customs, reported to his superior officer on board the cutter at anchor in the stream. When he had finished with the matter on which he had been detailed, he stopped to state that on his way through Chinatown he had noticed Stratton entering the house of a certain merchant and highbinder. "And," he continued, "returning, probably two hours later, my attention was attracted to a coolie who came out of the same place. He carried the baskets of a vegetable vender, suspended from the usual shoulder pole, but it was singular that, at the close of the day, and so far from the Chinese garden tracts in the suburbs, from which he must have been supplied,--those baskets should be full. I was walking in the same direction, and, at the end of the second block, a second fellow came up the cross street and fell in behind. His baskets also were heaped, apparently with produce, to the brim. They moved away in their swinging trot, more and more rapidly, and so bent on a direct course, that I felt justified in taking a hansom and following. On the edge of the town they turned out of the main thoroughfare, which would have led them to the gardens, and entered a little used trail; what seemed to be a short cut through the forest to some obscure harbor on the coast. I could go no farther in the cab, but, coming back by the park road, I saw from a height of Beacon Hill, which overlooks the channel, a small yacht with the lines and rigging of the _Phantom_, stealing up the shore."
This self-imposed task had delayed Bates an extra hour, during which he had held the cutter, which was under steam and ready to make the run across the Straits to the American port of entry. But his commanding officer accepted the information without comment. However, when the revenue boat had steamed out of the Arm, headed for her home port, he remained on the bridge, searching with his binoculars, first the Vancouver coast astern, and then, slowly, the great reach of running sea, that stretched away to the distant and tawny pall which hung over the American side and showed the vast sweep of the forest fires.