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76 faster"—his captain kept urging; and Archer tugged with all his young muscles. Other boats flamed alongside of them. "We 've caught up, going famously," he thought.

Just why it happened he never could have told. Suddenly a torch-lighted bow swerved astern of them,—nearly ran them down; and he saw above the smoky flame the goblin face of Beaky Lehane,—the flat, cartilaginous nose, the wide-spaced teeth, the evil little eyes, a face distorted in a mania of drunken passion.

"Git out o' my way!" he raved, with a fierce oath.

The boy in the stern half rose in terror. Behind the grinning face a hand left the pole of a dip-net, and tried to catch Lehane by the shoulder. But in the same instant he swung out savagely with the torch. The iron-shod stake crashed down on the head of the little boy, who fell with a kind of whimper into the bottom of the boat. Archer, rising in a rage, heard Peter roar at his back, and felt him leap astern. But he himself had the better place, and swung the oar like