Fate has everything mapped out like a game of chess. You move a pawn, and bang goes your bishop, or your knight, or your king; or she lets you almost win a game, and then checkmates you. But there is one thing to be said in her favor--rail at her how we will, she is always giving odds to the innocent.
Mike Bannock was in the pilothouse, looking over his charts, when the lookout in the crow's nest sang out: "Two boats adrift off the port bow, sir!" And Bannock, who was a first-class sailor, although a rough one, shouted down the tube to the engine room. The freighter came to a halt in about ten minutes. The castaways saw that they had been noted, and pulled gallantly at the oars.
There are some things which science, well advanced as it is, can not explain. Among them is the shock which cuts off the past and the countershock which reawakens memory. They may write treatise after treatise and expound, but they never succeed in truly getting beyond that dark wall of mystery.
At the sound of Jim Norton's voice and at the sight of his face--for subconsciously she must have been thinking of him all the while--a great blinding heat-wave seemed to burn across her eyes, and when the effect passed away she was herself again. A wild glance at her surroundings convinced her that both she and her lover were in danger. "Keep back," whispered Jim. "Don't recognize me."
"They believe that I've lost my mind, and I'll keep that idea in their heads. Sometime to-night I'll find a chance to talk to you."
It took a good deal of cautious maneuvering to bring about the meeting.
"They shanghaied me. And I thought you dead! It was all wrong. It was a trick of that Perigoff woman, and it succeeded. Girl, girl, I love you better than life!"
"I know it now," she said, and she kissed him. "Has my father appeared yet?"
[Illustration: "I KNOW IT NOW," SHE SAID, AND SHE KISSED HIM]
"Do you know anything at all about him?" sadly.
"I thought I did. It's all a jumble to me. But beware of the man who brought you here. He is the head of all our troubles; and if he knew I was on board he'd kill me out of hand. He'd have to."
Braine offered Bannock $1,000 to turn back as far as Boston; and as Bannock had all the time in the world, carrying no perishable goods, he consented. But he never could quite understand what followed. He had put Florence and Braine in the boat and landed them; but when he went down to see if Braine had left anything behind, he found that individual bound and gagged in his bunk.