She started toward the house. He followed. He felt his heart begin to pound. At the white door she paused, looking worriedly down the road. Jack thought he could hear the faint _chug_ of a motorboat. She pushed open the door and he followed her inside. The small-windowed room was dark after the sunlight. Jack got an impression of solid old furniture, a fireplace with brass andirons. "Flash!" croaked a gritty voice. "After their disastrous break day before yesterday, stocks are recovering. Leading issues...." Jack realized that he had started and had involuntarily put his arm around the girl's shoulders. At the same time he noticed that the voice was coming from the curved brown trumpet of an old-fashioned radio loudspeaker. The girl didn't pull away from him. He turned toward her. Although her gray eyes were on him, her attention had gone elsewhere. "I can hear the car. They're coming back. They won't like it that you're here." "All right they won't like it." Her agitation grew. "No, you must go." "I'll come back tomorrow," he heard himself saying. "Flash! It looks as if the World Economic Conference may soon adjourn, mouthing jeers at old Uncle Sam who is generally referred to as Uncle Shylock." Jack felt a numbness on his neck. The room seemed to be darkening, the girl growing stranger still. "You must go before they see you." "Flash! Wiley Post has just completed his solo circuit of the Globe, after a record-breaking flight of 7 days, 18 hours and 45 minutes. Asked how he felt after the energy-draining feat, Post quipped...." * * * * * He was halfway across the lawn before he realized the terror into which the grating radio voice had thrown him. He leaped for the branch over-hanging the fence, vaulted up with the risky help of a foot on the barbed top. A surprised squirrel, lacking time to make its escape up the trunk, sprang to the ground ahead of him. With terrible suddenness, two steel-jawed semicircles clanked together just over the squirrel's head. Jack landed with one foot to either side of the sprung trap, while the squirrel darted off with a squeak. Jack plunged down the slope to the rocky spine and ran across it, spray from the rising waves spattering him to the waist. Panting now, he stumbled up into the oaks and undergrowth of the first island, fought his way through it, finally reached the silent cove. He loosed the line of the _Annie O._, dragged it as near to the cove's mouth as he could, plunged knee-deep in freezing water to give it a final shove, scrambled aboard, snatched up the boathook and punched at the rocks. As soon as the _Annie O._ was nosing out of the cove into the cross waves, he yanked up the sail. The freshening wind filled it and sent the sloop heeling over, with inches of white water over the lee rail, and plunging ahead.