He boarded the Bar Pilots’ Association tender at Meiggs Wharf, and stood on the low deck as the swift little craft steamed out through the inner portal of the Golden Gate with a seven-knot ebb pushing on her stern. And now, just after the tug had passed Fort Point, the hill wind and the fog leaped down the Marin County slopes again, hand in hand--like two murderers coming to take a look at their intended victim as he goes by the appointed spot. The Lime Point siren bellowed after MacKenzie in hoarse warning, and he glanced behind him as the pair fled up the mountain. “Came on thick there for a minute,” he remarked to the man at the wheel, and turned his eyes ahead. Where Point Bonita thrusts its fangs into the Pacific, the helmsman turned the little craft squarely to the right, for the bar was breaking to that southwest swell, and, jockeying the swirling currents, brought her safely into the entrance of North Channel. Between the breakers of the shoal and the surf at the foot of the cliffs, she went until she rocked on the bosom of the open sea; then, as she neared the lightship, MacKenzie saw the pilot boat careening out to meet him like a swooping gull. * * * * * The rising sea was but a herald of a remote gale; there was scant breeze; the gray mists marked a perfect circle on the tossing ocean. In the center of this a speck of white under the apex of a drab dome, the pilot boat lay. Her spray-laved deck glinted dully, deserted now by all save her helmsman. Through the thick curtain of the mists he heard the lightship’s lonely roaring, the muffled moan of breakers on the bar, the constant whispering of a myriad hoary billows yearning toward the lowering heavens. Among these sounds he hearkened for another, and peered into the murk, watching, listening for the first far sign of some homing ship. Down in the cabin, MacKenzie and his two companions were killing with the gossip of the seven seas the time which separated them from home. They were talking of the long, blind trails which reach from the uttermost parts of the world, converging on this troubled patch of water, and of the ships that traveled by these pathways to the Golden Gate. The engines had stopped; the schooner was under sail; and in the pauses of their conversation the sounds of the ship and the sea came into the cabin--the rattle of a shifting block from overhead, the intermittent gurgle of the water alongside, and at intervals out of the surrounding depths the faint, clinking toll of the lightship’s submarine bell.