The Veiled Ladye!  Absorbed as Dan was, he felt a momentary flash of surprise that the announcement of that name came to him almost as a matter of course.  Through the long course of nearly two years the conviction that a time would come when he should once more meet the girl who had spoken to him from the Veiled Ladye’s deck at Norfolk had strengthened inexplicably, until he had come to accept it as an assured fact.  Was she aboard that yacht now?  Aboard that laboring section of gingerbread, in the hands of incompetents and poltroons?  Was she?  It could not be otherwise.  And this was the nature of the meeting which had colored his dreams and intensified the ambitions of his waking moments!

A strange thrill quivered through him, and he glanced dazedly at Mulhatton, as a stout man in yachting garb stumbled to the officer’s side and snatched the megaphone from his hands.

“On board the tug!” he cried.  “I’m Horace Howland of the Coastwise and West Indian Shipping Company.  We’re helpless; we can’t last an hour unless you hold our head up.  Engineer making a collar for cracked shaft . . . have it made and fitted in twelve hours.  Twelve hours.  Hold us up that long and we are safe!  Do you hear me . . . twelve hours!”

Dan looked at the yacht, rolling to her beam ends almost every minute.  It would be a bad business fooling with that craft; and with iron will he fought back his surging emotions.  He had his tug and his men to consider, if not himself.  His tug was weakened by her long struggle, and to the best of his judgment he knew it would be wiser for his own interests to go his way, leaving the yacht to her life fight, while the Fledgling fought hers.  And yet he could not go away.  Aside from the wild theory that the girl might be aboard, there were lives to save over there.  That was it.  There were lives to save over there.  Duty called—­a stern, clear call; at least, Dan so heard it, and he was willing to answer it with his life, if necessary.  But he did not think of that part of it.  It was the lives of those imperilled persons that concerned him.  He and his tug were there that they might live.  There were women aboard; he had seen their white faces gazing imploringly at him through the cabin portholes—­bright, beautiful lives—­and men in the glorious prime of their youth.  His heart went out to them, and as Mr. Howland laid aside his megaphone the problem was clear.  He waved his megaphone in assent and then, levelling it at the yacht, he cried: 

“All right.  Float a hawser down to us; you are pitching too wild-eyed to come within heaving-line distance.”  Passing the pilot-house on his way below, he nodded and smiled at the men inside.  There had been no need to question them.  They had been too long with Dan, and too faithful, not to catch his drift of mind in all emergencies long before he expressed it in words; too brave and hardened to danger, in fact, to care what Dan wanted, just so that he was willing to lead them—­to share with them the work to be done.