At last he said, “If Captain Rifle was right, the girl went overboard out there,” and he pointed.

Alan stood up.

“But she wouldn’t be there now,” Olaf added.

In his heart he believed she was, straight down—­at the bottom.  He turned his boat shoreward.  Creeping out from the shadow of the mountains was the white sand of the beach three or four miles away.  A quarter of an hour later a spiral of smoke detached itself from the rocks and timber that came down close to the sea.

“That’s McCormick’s,” he said.

Alan made no answer.  Through Olaf’s binoculars he picked out the Scotchman’s cabin.  It was Sandy McCormick, Olaf had assured him, who knew every eddy and drift in fifty miles of coast, and with his eyes shut could find Mary Standish if she came ashore.  And it was Sandy who came down to greet them when Ericksen dropped his anchor in shallow water.

They leaped out, thigh-deep, and waded to the beach, and in the door of the cabin beyond Alan saw a woman looking down at them wonderingly.  Sandy himself was young and ruddy-faced, more like a boy than a man.  They shook hands.  Then Alan told of the tragedy aboard the Nome and what his mission was.  He made a great effort to speak calmly, and believed that he succeeded.  Certainly there was no break of emotion in his cold, even voice, and at the same time no possibility of evading its deadly earnestness.  McCormick, whose means of livelihood were frequently more unsubstantial than real, listened to the offer of pecuniary reward for his services with something like shock.  Fifty dollars a day for his time, and an additional five thousand dollars if he found the girl’s body.

To Alan the sums meant nothing.  He was not measuring dollars, and if he had said ten thousand or twenty thousand, the detail of price would not have impressed him as important.  He possessed as much money as that in the Nome banks, and a little more, and had the thing been practicable he would as willingly have offered his reindeer herds could they have guaranteed him the possession of what he sought.  In Olaf’s face McCormick caught a look which explained the situation a little.  Alan Holt was not mad.  He was as any other man might be who had lost the most precious thing in the world.  And unconsciously, as he pledged his services in acceptance of the offer, he glanced in the direction of the little woman standing in the doorway of the cabin.

Alan met her.  She was a quiet, sweet-looking girl-woman.  She smiled gravely at Olaf, gave her hand to Alan, and her blue eyes dilated when she heard what had happened aboard the Nome.  Alan left the three together and returned to the beach, while between the loading and the lighting of his pipe the Swede told what he had guessed—­that this girl whose body would never be washed ashore was the beginning and the end of the world to Alan Holt.

For many miles they searched the beach that day, while Sandy McCormick skirmished among the islands south and eastward in a light shore-launch.  He was, in a way, a Paul Revere spreading intelligence, and with Scotch canniness made a good bargain for himself.  In a dozen cabins he left details of the drowning and offered a reward of five hundred dollars for the finding of the body, so that twenty men and boys and half as many women were seeking before nightfall.