Breeze and Nimbus were in the first dory thus left, and the flag on their buoy was marked No. 1. In less than three hours after they had been dropped, the _Fish-hawk_ returned to pick them up. All the other dories had been sighted as she came back, and the crews of two of them were catching fish hand over hand. The buoy bearing flag No. 1 was easily found, but to the dismay and distress of Captain Coffin and old Mateo, who were the only ones left aboard the schooner, no trace of the dory to which it belonged, nor of its occupants, was to be seen. CHAPTER XXI. TEMPTED FROM DUTY. For a whole day the _Fish-hawk_ cruised back and forth and in great circles in the vicinity of the deserted buoy, with a man constantly at the mast-head scanning the surface of the sea for some trace of the missing dory. Then leaving the spot, she ran into the coast, from which the buoy was about twenty miles distant, and made inquiries at several of the tiny fishing villages that nestle at the heads of the deep fiords. It was all in vain. Nothing was seen, nothing had been heard, and the cause of the dory’s sudden and complete disappearance could not even be satisfactorily guessed at. The only bit of information gained from the islanders was, that on the day the dory was lost a steamer had been seen skirting the coast, on her way to the southward, which was such an unusual circumstance that it was something to be talked about and wondered over. Finally the crew of the _Fish-hawk_ sailed sorrowfully back to the halibut grounds, convinced that their well-loved young shipmate and his black dory mate had been swallowed by the cold waters of that northern sea, and that they should never again see them in this world. Captain Coffin and old Mateo were especially distressed over what had happened, for they had loved the boy as an own son, and could not become reconciled to the fate which they supposed had overtaken him. It was the harder to bear because of its uncertainty. If they could only be sure of what had happened to him, and that he were not still drifting about, starving or perishing from thirst on that cruel sea, or stranded on some rocky islet of the inhospitable coast from which there was no escape! With all this, the cause of the dory’s disappearance was a very simple one. Its occupants had merely been led astray, as many another has been and will be, in the pursuit of riches. They had hardly been left on their station, and begun fishing, when the negro’s quick eye detected a small lump of grayish matter floating on the water but a short distance from them. At the sight he uttered an exclamation of joy, and hastily hauling in his line, he seized the oars and began to pull towards it. “What is the matter?” cried Breeze, who had not noticed the floating object, and would not have known what it was if he had. “Where are you going?”