It hung for one brief, breathless moment almost balanced on the middle of the bar, and the white sands thought they had it fast; but the next moment it slid gently from their grasp, gave a sort of spring as it felt itself slipping free, and the next moment rode easily in clear water, just over the bar. The next instant six exultant boys, their faces blazing with excitement and exertion, had scrambled aboard, falling over one another in their eagerness to seize the halyards. They hoisted the sails on the _Spray_ again in a way that would have made Captain Sam himself sing their praises, and now, with evening coming on, there was just enough breeze left in among the rocks to waft them gently along out of the inlet. They watched breathlessly, as they neared the entrance to the outer bay, for a glimpse of the _Nancy Jane_; but the _Nancy Jane_, good boat though she was, was just a moment too late. Scarcely had they turned the little bluff and were hidden behind it, on their way whither they might choose, when the _Nancy Jane_ rounded to at the entrance to the channel. “It’s all done,” Captain Sam had exclaimed, as he threw the wheel of the _Nancy Jane_ over and came up into the wind, but when he looked to see the _Spray_, she was not there. Not so much as a scrap of a sail nor the merest fragment of a hull, absolutely nothing. Captain Sam was so dumfounded he could only gasp and stare vacantly at the place where, by all rights, the _Spray_ ought to be. The colonel and the squire, who had no preconceived ideas about the passage between the islands, solved the problem at once; but not so the captain. “They’ve gone through there, you idiot,” exclaimed the squire, growing red in the face. “Where else can they be? They can’t fly, can they?” The captain groaned, as one whose pride had been cruelly smitten. “To think,” he muttered, “that I’ve sailed these waters, man and boy, for forty years, only to be fooled by a parcel of schoolboys from the city. Why, every boy in Southport knows you can’t run a sailboat through between Heron and Spring Islands. There ain’t enough water there at high tide to drown a sheep.” “Well, it seems they got through easy enough,” answered the colonel. “That’s it! That’s it!” responded the captain, warmly. “They do say as how fools rush in where angels don’t durst to go, and sometimes the fools blunder through all right. And here’s these boys gone and done what I’d a sworn a million times couldn’t be done.” “Yes, and we probably can get through, too, if we only go ahead and try, instead of lying here like jellyfish,” exclaimed the squire. “Cap’n Sam, seems as though you weren’t so dreadful anxious to catch up with them youngsters as you might be. P’r’aps you might have told Mrs. Warren back there a few things that might explain this ’ere delay.” “Yes, and if them boys can go through there, I, for one, don’t see what’s to hinder us,” chimed in the colonel. “Cap’n Sam, I don’t see what we’re a-hanging back for.”