when the wind blowed. What was it he robbed from ye, skipper?"

"Whatever it was, ye'll both git yer share if we finds it," replied the
skipper. "More nor that I bain't willin' to say."

He fixed Bill Brennen with a glance of his black eyes that made that
worthy tremble from his scantily-haired scalp to the soles of his big,
shuffling feet. Bill was one of those people who cannot get along
without a master. In the past, for lack of another, he had made an
exacting tyrant out of a very mild and loving wife; but since the
masterful opening of the new skipper's reign he had snapped his fingers
at his wife, who had ruled him for close upon twenty years. He was
shrewd, though weak, and his heart was full of the stuff in which
personal loyalty is bred and fostered. If the hand that beat him was the
hand that fed him--the hand of his master--then the beating seemed an
honorable and reasonable thing to him. True, the skipper had not yet
lifted a fist to him; but in this case darkling glances served quite as
well as blows. Bill had seen the strength of Dennis from the first and
from the first had loved it as a thing to serve--as the spirit of
mastery. Nick Leary, though a much younger man than Bill Brennen,
possessed the same spirit of service.

The three searched the barrens all day, from sun-up to dark, north,
south and inland. It was a gray day, sloppy underfoot and raw overhead.
At one time the skipper halted and lit his pipe within three yards of
the point of the edge of the cliff from which Quinn had pitched to his
death; but wind, snow and thaw had obliterated all trace of those
blindly staggering feet. The searchers explored the inner, tangled
recesses of a dozen thickets of spruce-tuck, snarled coverts of alders,
hollows hip-deep in sodden snow, and the pits and rocky shelters of