“The sea’ll never catch him!”

“But he’ll r-r-run her nose under!”

Even as they spoke, the black tarpaulin swooped from sight behind a big comber.  The next wave rolled over the spot, and the next, but the boat did not reappear.  The Alma rushed by the place.  A little riffraff of oats and boxes was seen.  An arm thrust up and a shaggy head broke surface a score of yards away.

For a time there was silence.  As the end of the lake came in sight, the waves began to leap aboard with such steady recurrence that the correspondents no longer chopped ice but flung the water out with buckets.  Even this would not do, and, after a shouted conference with Rasmunsen, they attacked the baggage.  Flour, bacon, beans, blankets, cooking-stove, ropes, odds and ends, everything they could get hands on, flew overboard.  The boat acknowledged it at once, taking less water and rising more buoyantly.

“That’ll do!” Rasmunsen called sternly, as they applied themselves to the top layer of eggs.

“The h-hell it will!” answered the shivering one, savagely.  With the exception of their notes, films, and cameras, they had sacrificed their outfit.  He bent over, laid hold of an egg-box, and began to worry it out from under the lashing.

“Drop it!  Drop it, I say!”

Rasmunsen had managed to draw his revolver, and with the crook of his arm over the sweep head, was taking aim.  The correspondent stood up on the thwart, balancing back and forth, his face twisted with menace and speechless anger.

“My God!”

So cried his brother correspondent, hurling himself, face downward, into the bottom of the boat.  The Alma, under the divided attention of Rasmunsen, had been caught by a great mass of water and whirled around.  The after leach hollowed, the sail emptied and jibed, and the boom, sweeping with terrific force across the boat, carried the angry correspondent overboard with a broken back.  Mast and sail had gone over the side as well.  A drenching sea followed, as the boat lost headway, and Rasmunsen sprang to the bailing bucket.

Several boats hurtled past them in the next half-hour,—­small boats, boats of their own size, boats afraid, unable to do aught but run madly on.  Then a ten-ton barge, at imminent risk of destruction, lowered sail to windward and lumbered down upon them.

“Keep off!  Keep off!” Rasmunsen screamed.

But his low gunwale ground against the heavy craft, and the remaining correspondent clambered aboard.  Rasmunsen was over the eggs like a cat and in the bow of the Alma, striving with numb fingers to bend the hauling-lines together.

“Come on!” a red-whiskered man yelled at him.

“I’ve a thousand dozen eggs here,” he shouted back.  “Gimme a tow!  I’ll pay you!”

“Come on!” they howled in chorus.

A big whitecap broke just beyond, washing over the barge and leaving the Alma half swamped.  The men cast off, cursing him as they ran up their sail.  Rasmunsen cursed back and fell to bailing.  The mast and sail, like a sea anchor, still fast by the halyards, held the boat head on to wind and sea and gave him a chance to fight the water out.