“We’ll catch him before Cariboo Crossing,” they assured Rasmunsen, as they ran up the sail and the Alma took the first icy spray over her bow.

Now Rasmunsen all his life had been prone to cowardice on water, but he clung to the kicking steering-oar with set face and determined jaw.  His thousand dozen were there in the boat before his eyes, safely secured beneath the correspondents’ baggage, and somehow, before his eyes were the little cottage and the mortgage for a thousand dollars.

It was bitter cold.  Now and again he hauled in the steering-sweep and put out a fresh one while his passengers chopped the ice from the blade.  Wherever the spray struck, it turned instantly to frost, and the dipping boom of the spritsail was quickly fringed with icicles.  The Alma strained and hammered through the big seas till the seams and butts began to spread, but in lieu of bailing the correspondents chopped ice and flung it overboard.  There was no let-up.  The mad race with winter was on, and the boats tore along in a desperate string.

“W-w-we can’t stop to save our souls!” one of the correspondents chattered, from cold, not fright.

“That’s right!  Keep her down the middle, old man!” the other encouraged.

Rasmunsen replied with an idiotic grin.  The iron-bound shores were in a lather of foam, and even down the middle the only hope was to keep running away from the big seas.  To lower sail was to be overtaken and swamped.  Time and again they passed boats pounding among the rocks, and once they saw one on the edge of the breakers about to strike.  A little craft behind them, with two men, jibed over and turned bottom up.

“W-w-watch out, old man,” cried he of the chattering teeth.

Rasmunsen grinned and tightened his aching grip on the sweep.  Scores of times had the send of the sea caught the big square stern of the Alma and thrown her off from dead before it till the after leach of the spritsail fluttered hollowly, and each time, and only with all his strength, had he forced her back.  His grin by then had become fixed, and it disturbed the correspondents to look at him.

They roared down past an isolated rock a hundred yards from shore.  From its wave-drenched top a man shrieked wildly, for the instant cutting the storm with his voice.  But the next instant the Alma was by, and the rock growing a black speck in the troubled froth.

“That settles the Yankee!  Where’s the sailor?” shouted one of his passengers.

Rasmunsen shot a glance over his shoulder at a black square-sail.  He had seen it leap up out of the grey to windward, and for an hour, off and on, had been watching it grow.  The sailor had evidently repaired damages and was making up for lost time.

“Look at him come!”

Both passengers stopped chopping ice to watch.  Twenty miles of Bennett were behind them—­room and to spare for the sea to toss up its mountains toward the sky.  Sinking and soaring like a storm-god, the sailor drove by them.  The huge sail seemed to grip the boat from the crests of the waves, to tear it bodily out of the water, and fling it crashing and smothering down into the yawning troughs.