Noon passed. The fog, which had been lifting for several hours, crawled up the great, tawny ridges where Tamalpais rises from the sea until it found upon the mountain’s flanks the ancient rendezvous where it had often met the hill wind. Here it bided the approaching hour when they would meet again, to descend hand in hand to the inner portal of the Golden Gate and bring to pass the thing for which they had been preparing. When the _Empress_ thrust her steep, black prow over the earth’s bulge, the circle had widened about the pilot boat until its drab circumference inclosed the headlands to the northeast and racing crests far beyond the silent, red-hulled lightship. The bar’s entire shape was projected upon the waters in a vivid horseshoe-shaped smear of white, to which the towering billows raced, whispering. As they reached it, blanching in the instant, they leaped, roaring, amid a myriad snarling predecessors. From the lurching deck MacKenzie sniffed the keen, primeval tang of seaweed uptorn from the depths; and he gazed seaward at the liner’s smoke, a filament of brown, infinitesimal on the somber heavens. “Raise the jack!” he ordered. A sailor pulled the star-flecked banner to the masthead; and over the horizon, across the wild reaches of the ocean, the homing steamship and the little schooner spoke their greetings, flag for flag. When they had drawn within a quarter of a mile of each other, the yawl slid from the skids into the hissing waters; the sailors sprang like cats between the thwarts; MacKenzie chose the next propitious instant, and followed them. They coasted from the summits of the gray-green billows into swirling troughs, shut off from all the world by rushing, foam-patched hills; they gained the lee of the biding liner. Her black side arose above them like the wall of a high building. From the summit of that wall the slender Jacob’s ladder dangled, now touching the edge of a rising wave, now receding skyward as the steamship rolled, showing her red belly. There came a moment when the _Empress_ settled toward the yawl, and the little boat rose as if to meet her. The sailors grunted at the oars; the yawl rushed broadside toward the lowering bulk. MacKenzie leaned forward in the stern sheets. The moment crystallized into a fleeting instant. The yawl was rising, the ship still descending; the end of the Jacob’s ladder hung within a few feet. Immediately that entire movement changed, and the ladder was swept away from the retreating boat. But in the passing of that instant, as one who casts behind him all else upon the seizing of swift-racing opportunity, MacKenzie rose and leaped. Out of the boat against the reeling steel wall he sprang; he gripped the ladder’s sides with both strong hands and found the step which lay unseen beneath him. Already the oarsmen were pulling off to safety; through the black plates he heard the clanging of the gong down in the engine room. He climbed up and gained the deck.