"Come, let us go back." He was leading her through swirling foam.
"How can we go back?" she whispered. But she followed him. They found the others waiting for them by the pier.
CHAPTER XI
It was not such dirty weather as McClintock the boatman had prophesied. Though the night was dark and the sky mantled in heavy cloud, the rain was hardly more than a Scotch mist. That is to say, it was no rain at all in the terms of the North. On the mainland the temperature was mild to mugginess. But once away and under full sail, a decent little breeze carried the boat smartly over the long rollers.
Napier had taken his place at the tiller. Half-way to the objective, which had not yet been named, he added to the sense of the importance of the expedition by proposing to double McClintock's fee as some compensation for doing without his pipe for an hour or two after landing.
Napier anticipated a tussle over this point. McClintock's grunt might mean anything from pig-headed refusal to whole-hearted agreement.
"Naturally," Napier went on, with an air of being a deal more easy than he felt, "when I wanted to overhaul Gull Island, I thought of the man who took Julian and me there when we were boys."
"Gairrmans!" remarked McClintock, careful to abstain from the rising inflection.
"What! Have you seen something?"