This gleam of light, transient as it was, had sufficed, however, for the sharp lookout aboard the _Surprise_. Harvey seized Joe Hinman by the shoulder and whispered, as he steered the _Surprise_ out from behind the end of the island: “Did you see that, Joe? Did you see it? There’s something coming up. Everybody keep quiet now!” There was an excited group that crouched silently in the cockpit of the _Surprise_ as she swung out from under the lee of the island and headed straight for the spot where they had seen the flash of light, running almost before the wind. Whatever the craft was, it seemed as if they must surely catch it, leaping out as they had from the darkness. All at once they saw the dark outline of a yacht almost dead ahead, and saw for a moment the shadow of its sails, a faint blur through the rain. Then the yacht veered about suddenly, and they saw the white crush of water as it heeled over, and, running with the wind on its quarter, was gone, like a boat that had vanished. So sudden and so silent was the manœuvre that they could hardly realize that the yacht had, indeed, turned like a flash and run away. They followed for a moment, but, seeing how useless it was, Harvey soon gave up the chase and went back to harbour, beaten but not discouraged. “That was the man we want,” he said, as they came to in the nearest harbour that night. “No other craft would have gone off its course that way. And to think we were almost upon him.” “Yes, but I don’t see what good it would have done us to have come up with him, if it was the man,” replied Allan Harding. “We could only have taken a look aboard. What else could we have done?” “I’ll tell you what,” answered Harvey, emphatically. “It would have done a lot of good. I tell you that wherever and whenever I meet that yacht, whether it’s night or day, I’m going to run alongside, and you fellows and I are going aboard. I’ve been doing things to be ashamed of long enough,—not that I’m ashamed of them, either, as I know of. Only they have been things that I didn’t dare tell of afterward, and I’m sort of tired of it. I tell you, I want to do something for once that I can boast of and that people won’t hate me for. That’s why I’m so anxious about this, if you must know it.” “Whew!” cried Joe Hinman. “That’s something new for you, Jack. I didn’t suppose your conscience ever troubled you.” “It don’t,” said Harvey, angrily. But perhaps it did. By the end of a few days more, Harvey had given up the search, convinced that they had seen the last of the black yacht, if, indeed, they had seen it at all. “I give up,” he said. “I’m beaten, and that’s all there is to it.” And so the idea of ever seeing the strange yacht again was given up by all. The yachts came back to harbour, and the impression became general that they had all been fooled; that what they had sought was a delusion.