"It means more," said Lodge, in his quiet, excited way. "It means that unless we signal a vessel today we are lost. The leak is growing worse and we have nothing to escape in. There! I knew you would not faint, you have more sense than any woman in the world. You must go up on deck and watch for a ship. John, the cook, and I will attend to the pump, and Henriette can make coffee for us. I will send you a cup at once," and then he left

her.

Beatrix mechanically threw her fur cloak about her, found her glass, and went up on deck. She had fully made up her mind that this was to be the last day of her life. They had not seen a ship for a week, why should they see one that day? And Beatrix was logical or nothing. Then she wished that she had stayed in San Francisco in spite of ennui and unpleasant husbands, she was young and did not want to die. But then if she had remained in San Francisco, Lodge would have been lost that day she picked him up. But he was going to be lost anyhow, so what difference? And her book? Perhaps it would choke a shark: there was comfort in the thought. She raised her glass with a sigh and listlessly scanned the horizon. Then she dropped it with a little cry, then raised it again, and with a hand that had suddenly lost its nerves, tried to hold it stationary for some moments.

She had not been mistaken; there was a vessel in sight. But would it see them, or was it going in an opposite direction? It was too far off to tell. Their flag of distress was flying, but would it be noticed? And then the object grew closer and closer until there could be no further doubt that it was bearing directly down upon the Dolores.

Beatrix's maid came up with a cup of coffee, and she bade her go and tell Lodge the news. The girl who was a picture of faithful, helpless woe, gave a shriek, dropped the coffee, and flew to inform the men at the pumps. Lodge sent a message of congratulation, but could not leave his post.

In the course of an hour the ship had cast anchor within a mile of them and dispatched a boat to the Dolores. The officer in command of the boat boarded the yacht, and was profuse of his offers of assistance to beauty in distress. He spoke in French.

and informed her that the vessel which stood eager to embrace her was a French passenger steamer, running between Havre and Algiers, and that there were many Americans on board. When he was informed that the captain and crew had deserted the yacht- had deserted her. he called upon heaven to punish them with a watery grave. Secretly, however, it is possible that he was a little relieved; they would have been something of a tax upon his hospitality. "If your party is not a large one," he said in conclusion, "I can accommodate you very comfortably. I have two first class state-rooms unoccupied.”

It was not a large party Beatrix hastened to assure him. In fact there were only - she stopped and turned suddenly pale. "If you will send a boat for us, we will be ready in an hour," she continued hurriedly. "There are some things that must be packed. No, thank you, we do not need any help"; and she left him somewhat dazed at her abrupt departure, but enthusiastic.

She went directly down to the saloon, and sending her maid to do the necessary packing, flung herself down into a chair, covered her face with her hands, and burst into a storm of tears.

"What is the matter?" asked a voice gently. "Have you broken down, now that the danger is over, after bearing up so bravely all through ?" Lodge sat down, be

side her and put his hand on hers soothingly. Beatrix shook her head, but it was some time before she could speak, and Lodge waited patiently. Finally she calmed herself, and taking her handkerchief from her eyes turned and faced him desperately, regardless of the possible havoc tears had made with her beauty.

"We are saved in one sense," she said,

but cannot you guess

Lodge looked at her with wide-open eyes and not a ray of the expected intelligence. "What is it?" he asked.

"O you men, you are so dense!" exclaimed Beatrix impatiently. "Don't you know don't you see ," she went on desperately. "O, why cannot you see it for yourself? Don't you know that I am ruined, ruined forever?”

Lodge gasped, "Ruined? That ship could not have brought you bad news?"

Don't

I regret to say that Beatrix stamped her foot. "Will you never understand?" she exclaimed. "Don't you know that you and I are alone on this yacht? That we have been alone for weeks? O, why did not I bring some one with me? you know what the world will say? you know that I can never hold up my again? That I shall be the subject of common scandal-I- my God!" And she threw herself back into her chair and covered her face with her hands once more.

Don't head

Lodge for the moment said nothing. His face was very pale and her meaning was no longer vague to him; he understood perfectly. "But your servants," he said finally.

She shook her head. Should my husband drag the affair into a court I could clear myself, of course. But the world would have talked itself out before that; the servants cannot be sent about giving the story the lie, nor would any one believe them if they were. And a divorce suit great heavens !”

He was silent again for a moment, after

his habit. "I might pass for a sailor or as one of your servants," he said then.

She removed her handkerchief and looked at him for a moment, then gave a bitter little laugh. "You are unmistakable from the crown of your head to the sole of your foot," she said. "And look at your hands."

Lodge glanced down at his white, slender hands and sighed. "He had been very proud of those hands in days gone by, as what he considered his one beauty; but he would have exchanged them now for those of the coarsest farm laborer. He leaned his head on his hand, and there was a long silence. Suddenly he started slightly, and in a moment leaned forward and fixed upon her the long, abstracted, introspective stare, with which she was aware he was in the habit of prefacing a momentous observation.

"There is another way," he said quietly, "I can stay on the yacht."

Beatrix rose slowly to her feet and he arose also and faced her. "What did you say?” she said.

"I will stay here with the yacht," he repeated.

66

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"No," he said, "I am not crazy. Listen to me. We both understand what the consequences will be if we go on board that ship together. And it must not be. You are very young and you are very proud, — I never realized how proud until I sketched your head, and to drag out twenty or thirty years of life with a tattered reputation, a scandal that would cling to you forever, would be something beyond your endurance. You would have left all youth and hope and possibilities of happiness behind you on this yacht. And a man can die but once, and after it is over what matter? He cannot look back, and so is spared regret. Besides, to tell you the truth, I have no intention of dying. While the men have been

at the pumps this morning I have been making a raft out of the deck house. It is almost ready, and ten to one I will be picked up by another vessel. I will lock myself up in my cabin and you can go up on deck and raise the cry that I have fallen overboard. Your servants need never be the wiser, and they will keep your secret. If they ever hear of me again it is easy to trump up a story."

Beatrix looked at him with wide open eyes and blanched face. The sacrifice was so stupendous a one that she failed to grasp it at once, and was conscious of an analytical curiosity regarding the man himself. "You would sacrifice your life for me?" she said. "And your art, your future, your career?”

"They will not be sacrificed," he said. evasively. "I tell you I shall be saved. Men have been rescued from worse straits than mine. The raft is almost finished, and the yacht will float for an hour after the men leave the pumps."

She looked at him a moment without replying. Was he mad? Had she been wrong and others right in pronouncing genius more or less unhinged? Had the tragic circumstances and his love for her for she knew, of course, that he loved her produced a state of mental exaltation, which demanded self-sacrifice, as a necessity, and denuded death of its terrors? Would any other man she had ever known be capable of so Quixotic an action? She made a rapid mental inventory of the men she knew and had known. Not one of them could she picture standing before her as Lodge was standing now. A sacrifice of this kind was in keeping with the heroic ages, not with the nineteenth century. Life today was a sensible, well conducted, matter-of-fact affair, with an occasional dash of sentiment thrown in; consequently man's mind was not tuned to the romantic, and a watery grave for love's sake was among the opportunities unsought. Judging from the

statistics culled from the daily press it is the lower and middle classes alone who are in the habit of resorting to cold steel and hot lead at the bidding of the blind god. But David Lodge had a walk all to himself. and was not to be judged by common standards. His face was set, his eyes wer steady, almost luminous, there was nothing betokening insanity about him. He had the air of quiet deliberation peculiar to a man who had made up his mind after long and patient reflection only.

I

"Listen to me," he continued, before she had found words with which to answer. do not know whether it is worth while to go over the ground again. I do not know that I can more forcibly present to you what will be the consequences do we leave this yacht together. If you balk my plan and tell those men when they return that I am on board this yacht, your reputation is gone forever. Do you realize it?-forever. It is a long word, Mrs. Melton. And life is very long also, wretchedly long when one knows that she has been made the subject of jest and scandal and newspaper vulgarity. thing be worse than that last?

Can anyTo be so

commonized, so rolled and dragged in the dust. You! It would kill you. With your money and social prestige you would be able to retain your position in San Francisco, but do you think you would find any comfort in that? Your real prestige would be gone, there as elsewhere; and what is more, every subsequent thoughtless, trifling act on your part would be misconceived and and twisted until ugly stories would accumulate and float about you did you fly to the North Pole. And you would be made to suffer doubly:

you are young, and beautiful, and rich, and clever these things are hard to forgive, Mrs. Melton, and you have not been at pains to conciliate the world. And there is no way out of the difficulty but the one I have proposed. To make matters worse, I left so abruptly that few knew whether I went by water or land. And what

I want to do is right; I feel that it is right, and I humbly beg of you to look at it from my point of view. I think I have made my argument sufficiently strong; I do not know how to make it stronger. And you must decide quickly, for we have little time to lose. Remember that you have to decide a question that will determine the color of your whole future. And I believe, I firmly believe, that I shall reach land in safety. I was given talents and put on this earth to accomplish an object, and I have not yet accomplished it. But if it has been otherwise ordained you will have nothing with which to reproach yourself in after life it was to be, and you are in no way responsible. O, Mrs. Melton, cannot you see that I am right, that what I say is true, that you can and must decide but in one way?"

She looked at him with a slow horror growing in her eyes, but made no reply. He turned from her and walked toward his state-room. When he had laid his hand on the knob of the door he turned. "Go up and tell them I have fallen overboard," he said. "The men speak no French, and your maid can be warned to express no surprise before the men who will return with the boat." Then he entered his stateroom and locked the door behind him.

She made a step or two uncertainly, like a man who is drunk, then walked slowly toward the door and up the staircase. As she reached the deck she saw the boat of the French passenger steamer returning. She walked down the deck and stopped before the men at the pumps.

"Mr. Lodge is in his stateroom," she said. Gertrude Franklin Atherton.

In telling me the story of the Ka-mets, Tony wished me distinctly to understand that it was neither mythical nor a superstition, "like the Okahtuh or the Lakl-chooncha, which one may be permitted to doubt until he sees them; but these people have lived"; and rising from his seat and looking proudly at me, "I, Tony Mectock, have seen the last of the Ka-mets!"

In the face of this indisputable evidence. - for Tony has splendid dark eyes, and I can vouch for the fact that he can see a long way off -- I give the story almost in his own words:

From two to three miles above the confluence of the Tom-ki with the South Eel River, and on the right hand side of the creek going up, rises a bluff from three to

four hundred feet high, with an immense rock on the summit. The face of this rock, looking north, is almost perpendicular, with the oval opening, seen at a long distance, of a cave in the very centre. On each side of this rocky bluff, the country is as wild as any in Northern California, and until some eight years before this time, was nearly, if not entirely, impenetrable with chemisal, verde, or greasewood.

Fronting the bluff on the other side of the creek the mountain gently slopes down to the water, treeless, almost even, and in the spring covered with green grass and wildflowers. At the foot of the bluff, toward the river, with its base bathing in the water of the creek, and in the rainy season entirely submerged in it, is a tolerably large,

table-like bowlder, with a round excavation on top like a basin, evidently made by the hand of man, and not by nature. The edge is rounded and polished smooth as glass; it is about three feet in depth, and at present half or two-thirds filled with gravel and debris. To this day this bowlder is known among the Redwoods and the other Indians as the "Ka-met's pounding-rock."

In the olden time the bluff was the eastern boundary of the territory of the Moighnomes, who had a large rancheria just below it, at the intersection of the creek with the river. When I say "olden times," I mean, as nearly and as accurately as I can compute from the periods in Tony's genealogical tree, and as he says, "Indians are mightily deceiving in their age," - about one hundred years ago. As the expression "a hundred years ago" is somewhat hackneyed, however, and for fear that the reader might suppose that it is not original with me, I will add ten more to it and say one hundred and ten years since.

The rancheria, as I have said, was large, for it comprised nearly all the tribe, and its inhabitants were living happy and contented, when all at once strange and mysterious signs and sounds were seen and heard in the woods and in the wilderness up the creek. Huge footprints were discovered on the sand and in the mud on the margin of the stream. Old women, gathering the dry twigs and dead wood for fuel, coming home in the twilight when the sounds of nature are hushing in sleep, heard voices sounding as if in the air far above their heads. One morning two girls grubbing with their sharppointed sticks for fish-worms on the green hillside facing the rocky bluff, saw for a moment a gigantic man on the top of the summit rock, who in powerful tones shouted to them over the tree-tops, to leave the place, and disappeared again as if sinking into the solid rock.

At last, two children, a little boy and

girl, wandering late one afternoon on the banks of the creek, about half way between the rancheria and the bluff, came upon a white woman of great stature, dressed in skins like the Indians, and with a huge basket slung behind her back. She seized the children, one in each hand, threw them into the basket, and started for the bluff. She held a stick in each hand, and as she ran, or rather trotted onward, under her load, she struck the top of the basket with these, first on one side and then on the other, to keep the children from jumping out, the strokes falling quickly and keeping time with her feet.

The little boy, although frightened nearly out of his wits, did not altogether lose his presence of mind; and peeping out between the strokes he saw at some distance before him an overhanging limb under which the woman must pass on her way up the bluff. He gathered himself together, and as the limb loomed up above him he sprang for it, and with his hand clasped over it remained suspended while the woman trotted on with the little girl only in the basket. Very soon, however, she became sensible of the increased lightness of her load and stopped, unslung her basket, laid it on the ground, and discovered that its contents were reduced by half. In her anger and disappointment, not thinking of the probable consequence, she left the basket and ran back under the impression that one of the children had dropped out, and that she would soon pick him up again.

But the little boy had lost no time. Dropping from the limb he took to his heels and ran away as fast as his little legs could carry him, taking his circuitous route toward the rancheria, which he finally reached safely, although half dead with fright and fatigue. Meanwhile the little girl had her wits about her too; the woman had no sooner turned her back than the child popped out of the basket and made a straight