The Captain sucked his mustache, then furiously, striking the desk
with his fist:

"The bark's ours!" there was a certain ring of defiance in his
voice. "Damn the will! I ain't so cock-sure about the law, but
I'll make sure."

"As how?" said Wilbur.

Kitchell slung the will out of the open port into the sea.

"That's how," he remarked. "I'm the heir. I found the bark; mine
she is, an' mine she stays--yours an' mine, that is."

But Wilbur had not even time to thoroughly enjoy the satisfaction
that the Captain's words conveyed, before an idea suddenly
presented itself to him. The girl he had found on board of the
bark, the ruddy, fair-haired girl of the fine and hardy Norse
type--that was the daughter, of course; that was "Moran."
Instantly the situation adjusted itself in his imagination. The
two inseparables father and daughter, sailors both, their lives
passed together on ship board, and the "Lady Letty" their dream,
their ambition, a vessel that at last they could call their own.

Then this disastrous voyage--perhaps the first in their new craft--
the combustion in the coal--the panic terror of the crew and
their desertion of the bark, and the sturdy resolution of the
father and daughter to bring the "Letty" in--to work her into port
alone. They had failed; the father had died from gas; the girl,