CHAPTER I. Nellie Callahan was the only one to see just what happened. Everyone else in camp had gone down the island that day to get a count of the half -wild cattle among the blueberry swamps. The wild drive of rain and low clouds to the westward hid Garden Island from sight and lowered all the horizon until Lake Michigan seemed a small place. Beaver Island was clear vanished. And so was High Island with its colony of Israelites. Nothing was to be seen from this north end of Hog Island except the foaming shallows and the deeper water beyond, and the huge rollers bursting in from the Wisconsin shore with two other things. One, as the keen blue eyes of the She had heard shots, faint reports cracking down the wind, drawing her to the point of land to see what was happening out there toward Garden Island. For a long while there was nothing to see until the boat came into sight. It was only a blotch rising and then gone again, gradually sinking from sight altogether. Few would have seen it. Nellie Callahan, however, was an island girl and her eye was instantly caught by anything outside the settled scheme of things. So she knew it for a boat and after a time knew that it had gone down entirely. Presently she made out the man. To her intense astonishment he was sitting on the stern of a canoe and paddling. Canoes are rare things in the Beaver Islands these days. Here in the center of Lake Michigan with the nearest land little more than a mirage above the horizon. There are other and safer playthings and life is too bitter hard to be lightly held. Yet here was a canoe driving down the storm, a rag of sail on a stumpy mast forward, tarpaulins lashed over freight rolls amid ships, the man paddling in the stern. What connection was there between him and that sunken boat? And those shots behind the curtain of rain and mist? That he was trying to get in under the curving line of exposed ledge and shoal that ran out from the point was obvious. If he missed, he would be carried on out to the open lake, for once around the point his chances of getting to land were slim. Nellie Callahan watched him admiringly as he fought, gaining inch by inch, now leaning hard on his paddle, now stroking desperately as the gusty wind threw off the canoe's head. The odds were worse than he could realize too. All along the point there were shoals running about two to three feet of water and his canoe evidently carried a centerboard. Suddenly she saw the paddle snap in his hands. The canoe swayed wildly over, swayed back again, rose on a sweeping foam crest and was flung forward. Another instant and she would have been rolled over, but the man snatched out another paddle and dug it in. Again