In Professor Vango’s ears the sobbing of the siren on Lime Point was lulling him to a sleep that promised eternal forgetfulness, and the Alcatraz Island bell was tolling grewsomely of his passing, when his senses were aroused by a brisker note that came in quick, padded beats through the fog. He summoned his drowsy wits for a last effort, and gazed into the gloom. Suddenly, piercing the cloudy curtain drawn about him, came a small launch, stern on, churning its way at full speed straight at him. In another moment it would have sped past him, to be swallowed up in the darkness again, but, with a mighty struggle, he threw himself at the boat, and, dodging the whirling propeller, clutched the rail with a violence that made the craft careen. It dipped as if to throw him off, but Vango held on and screamed hoarsely for help. No reply came from the boat, nor was anybody to be seen in it, so at last he made shift to climb aboard and reach the cock-pit. The vapour and darkness lay about him like a pall, muffling even the outlines of the boat itself; no lights were burning aboard. Shivering, perplexed, terrified, but grateful for his preservation, and wondering where his fate had led him, the Professor started on a further examination of the launch. He had taken but a few steps, when his foot struck a soft something extended upon the floor. His teeth chattered with fear as he groped down and made it out to be a human form. That it was a woman, he discovered by the long hair that had overflowed her shoulders in crisp waves, and a touch of her body showed that she was alive. He lifted her to a sitting posture on the seat, then loosened her dress at the neck, and chafed her wrists and temples. Her breath soon came in gasps; she sighed heavily and sat erect, with a shudder. She gazed into his face in the dimness, then cast her eyes over the boat and fell to weeping. So, for some time, the launch, carrying its two wretched passengers, and what more Vango dared not guess, plunged on insanely through the fog. The medium knew nothing of practical affairs; psychology was his art, and chicanery his science; but even had he been mechanic enough to stop and reverse the engine in the dark, it would have taken a considerable acquaintance with the Bay of San Francisco to have set and kept any logical course in such a night. Wrapped in a tarpaulin which he found by him, under which his dripping form shivered in misery, the unhappy man sat, baffled, mystified, hopeless, too beat about in his mind even to wonder. The woman cried on and the propeller kept up its rhythmic thud, thud, thud, dragging the little vessel where it would. Suddenly the swing of the choppy sea flung the woman at full length across the seat and brought her to her senses. She arose, now, and scanned the fog, then peered curiously at the medium, who was silent from very terror.