The man in the sloop held his course.

“Damn you, MacRae; lay to, or I’ll run you down,” the patriarch at the cutter’s wheel shouted, when a boat’s length separated the two craft.

MacRae’s lips moved slightly, but no sound issued therefrom.  Leaning on the tiller, he let the sloop run.  So for a minute the boats sailed, the white yacht edging up on the sloop until it seemed as if her broaded-off boom would rake and foul the other.  But when at last she drew fully abreast the two men sheeted mainsail and jib flat while the white-headed helmsman threw her over so that the yacht drove in on the sloop and the two younger men grappled MacRae’s coaming with boat hooks, and side by side they came slowly up into the wind.

MacRae made no move, said nothing, only regarded the three with sober intensity.  They, for their part, wasted no breath on him.

“Elizabeth, get in here,” the girl’s father commanded.

It was only a matter of stepping over the rubbing gunwales.  The girl rose.  She cast an appealing glance at MacRae.  His face did not alter.  She stepped up on the guard, disdaining the hand young Gower extended to help her, and sprang lightly into the cockpit of the Gull.

“As for you, you calculating blackguard,” her father addressed MacRae, “if you ever set foot on Maple Point again, I’ll have you horsewhipped first and jailed for trespass after.”

For a second MacRae made no answer.  His nostrils dilated; his blue-gray eyes darkened till they seemed black.  Then he said with a curious hoarseness, and in a voice pitched so low it was scarcely audible: 

“Take your boat hooks out of me and be on your way.”

The older man withdrew his hook.  Young Gower held on a second longer, matching the undisguised hatred in Donald MacRae’s eyes with a fury in his own.  His round, boyish face purpled.  And when he withdrew the boat hook he swung the inch-thick iron-shod pole with a swift twist of his body and struck MacRae fairly across the face.

MacRae went down in a heap as the Gull swung away.  The faint breeze out of the west filled the cutter’s sails.  She stood away on a long tack south by west, with a frightened girl cowering down in her cabin, sobbing in grief and fear, and three men in the Gull’s cockpit casting dubious glances at one another and back to the fishing sloop sailing with no hand on her tiller.

In an hour the Gull was four miles to windward of the sloop.  The breeze had taken a sudden shift full half the compass.  A southeast wind came backing up against the westerly.  There was in its breath a hint of something stronger.

Masterless, the sloop sailed, laid to, started off again erratically, and after many shifts ran off before this stiffer wind.  Unhelmed, she laid her blunt bows straight for the opening between Sangster and Squitty islands.  On the cockpit floor Donald MacRae sprawled unheeding.  Blood from his broken face oozed over the boards.