Sol Burton was raving mad when he once more regained his feet; the fellow was an ugly chap, a great bully ashore, and a cruel heartless man afloat. As he arose he exclaimed: "All right, you're fixed for me to-night; but my time will come! I'll get square with you before you're much older!" Sol Burton turned and walked away a baffled man. Spencer Vance walked to the point on the beach where he had stood when the girl had come to him with the strange warning. The young man was a Government officer, a special detective, and had been assigned to the collector at the port of New York to run down an organized gang of smugglers who were known to be doing a large business off the Long Island coast. Several detectives had been detailed to work up the matter, and one after another they had mysteriously disappeared, and the Government had never succeeded in solving the mystery of their taking off; and further, none of the officers had ever been able to locate the head-quarters of the gang. One fact had been established: large quantities of smuggled goods had been carried into New York, and each week the Government was swindled out of thousands of dollars of revenue; and the illicit traffic had grown to such an extent that a number of honest merchants had subscribed a large sum of money which had been placed at the disposal of the collector to be used as a fund for the breaking up of the gang, who were ruining regular importers in certain branches of trade and commerce. Spencer Vance, although but a young man, had quite a reputation as a detective. He had done some daring work in running down a gang of forgers, and in the employ of a State Government, he had been very successful in breaking up several gangs of illicit whisky distillers. He was a resolute, cool, experienced man, an officer who had faced death a hundred times under the most perilous circumstances. And when summoned upon the new duty he accepted the position readily. By methods of his own he got upon the track of the workers; the men who did the actual work of landing the contraband goods. The latter were not the really guilty men. They were not the principals, the capitalists; but they were the employees who for large pay ran off the coast, intercepted the steamers carrying the contraband goods, and landed them within certain assigned limits. The men ostensibly were fishermen, and honest people among whom they associated never "tumbled" to their real calling. CHAPTER III. The necessities of our narrative do not demand that we should locate the exact quarter where the smugglers operated; and, besides, as there were numerous gangs covering a space of fifty miles along the coast, it would be almost impossible to indicate intelligibly the field of their operations, were we so inclined.