. . the _Veiled Ladye_, with
Mr. Horace Howland and a party aboard."
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 .
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