“Miss Jane Harding?” repeated the clerk, and at the cool negation of his tone my heart gave a sickening downward swoop.  “Miss Jane Harding and party have left the hotel!”

“For—­for the island?” I gasped.

He raised his eyebrows.  “Can’t say, I’m sure.”  He gave me an appraising stare.  Perhaps the woe in my face touched him, for he descended from the eminence of the hotel clerk where he dwelt apart sufficiently to add, “Is it important that you should see her?”

“I am her niece.  I have come all the way from San Francisco expecting to join her here.”

The clerk meditated, his shrewd eyes piercing the very secrets of my soul.

“She knew nothing about it,” I hastened to add.  “I intended it for a surprise.”

This candor helped my cause.  “Well,” he said, “that explains her not leaving any word.  As you are her niece, I suppose it will do no harm to tell you that Miss Harding and her party embarked this morning on the freighter Rufus Smith, and I think it very likely that the steamer has not left port.  If you like I will send a man to the water-front with you and you may be able to go on board and have a talk with your aunt.”

Did I thank him?  I have often wondered when I waked up in the night.  I have a vision of myself dashing out of the hotel, and then the hack that brought me is bearing me away.  Bellboys hurled my bags in after me, and I threw them largess recklessly.  Some arch-bellboy or other potentate had mounted to the seat beside the driver.  Madly we clattered over cobbled ways.  Out on the smooth waters of the roadstead lay ships great and small, ships with stripped masts and smokeless funnels, others with faint gray spirals wreathing upward from their stacks.  Was one of these the Rufus Smith, and would I reach her—­or him—­before the thin gray feather became a thick black plume?  I thought of my aunt at the mercy of these unknown adventurers with whom she had set forth, helpless as a little fat pigeon among hawks, and I felt, desperately, that I must reach her, must save her from them and bring her safe back to shore.  How I was to do this at the eleventh hour plus about fifty-seven minutes as at present I hadn’t considered.  But experience had taught me that once in my clutches Aunt Jane would offer about as much resistance as a slightly melted wax doll.  She gets so soft that you are almost afraid to touch her for fear of leaving dents.

So to get there, get there, get there, was the one prayer of my soul.

I got there, in a boat hastily commandeered by the hotel clerk’s deputy.  I suppose he thought me a belated passenger for the Rufus Smith, for my baggage followed me into the boat. “Pronto!” he shouted to the native boatman as we put off. “Pronto!” I urged at intervals, my eyes upon the funnels of the Rufus Smith, where the outpouring smoke was thickening alarmingly.  We brought up under the side of the little steamer, and the wide surprised face of a Swedish deckhand stared down at us.