only a yard or two above the surface of the twisting currents. All this
was but the beginning of a task that would require weeks, perhaps
months, of labor to complete. It was Black Dennis Nolan's intention to
construct, by means of great iron rings, bolts and staples,
chain-cables, hawsers and life-lines, a solid net by the help of which
his people could extend their efforts at salving the valuables from a
fast-breaking vessel to the outermost rock of that dangerous
archipelago, even at the height of a storm--with luck. In the past, even
in his own time, several ships bound from Northern Europe for Quebec had
been driven and dragged from their course, shattered upon those rocks,
sucked off into deep water, and lost forever, without having contributed
so much as a bale of sail-cloth to the people of Chance Along. He was
determined that cases of this kind should not happen in the future. The
net was to be so arranged that the greater part of it could be removed,
and the balance submerged, with but slight effort, and later all
returned to its working condition as easily; for it would not be well to
draw the attention of outsiders to the contrivance. Wrecking, in those
days, meant more than the salvage of cargoes, perhaps. The skipper
hoped, in time (should the experiment prove successful at the mouth of
the harbor), to rig the dangerous and productive archipelago off Squid
Beach and Nolan's Cove with similar contrivances. There was not another
man in Chance Along capable of conceiving such ideas; but Dennis was
ambitious (in his crude way), imaginative, daring, unscrupulous and
full of resources and energy.

All day the skipper and his men worked strenuously, and at break of dawn
on the morrow they returned to their toils. By noon a gigantic iron
hook, forged by the skipper himself, with a shank as thick as a strong
man's arm and fully four feet long, had been set firmly in the face of
the cliff. The skipper and five or six of his men stood at the edge of