pants are torn pretty bad. I guess you'll need a new outfit."
"We are much of a height," Bettington said, looking at him. "If you have anything to spare I'll buy them from you."
"I'll lend you an outfit," Gibbs said, "and you can get what you want down to Blackport. The sea's calm now and you can row across the bay in half an hour. I'll be sorry to see you go," he added a little nervously. "I get kinda lonely here. I used to have a dog, but he got poisoned—"
Knocked Out
The summer sun had tanned Bet-tington to a rich brown. In his sea-boots—the only ones Gibbs had to lend—his faded blue sweater and khaki shirt, he looked the sort of fishing type he had often painted.
At the dock he took a ten-foot rowboat and set out to the village, now plainly to be seen a couple of miles across the bay.
He had gone, perhaps, half the distance, when a fast motor boat over-hauled him, slackened speed as it passed and then swung round and waited in the path he was taking.
There were two men in it. One was a vastly broad-chested man with a trim sweater and white canvas trousers. He had the look of a yacht sailor.
The other, who was steering the boat, had no physical peculiarities other than that general air of following the sea.
"We've had an accident," said the broad-chested man, and pointed to something at the bottom of the launch, something as yet out of Bettington's range of vision.
Bettington clung to the side of the drifting motor boat and stood up. There, lying on the bottom of the other craft, was a man. And as the artist stooped over him, the recumbent sailor gave a tremendous half-arm jab which caught Bettington on the point of the jaw.
The other two grabbed him as his head fell forward and hauled him on board where, unconscious, he took the place of his assailant, who rose grinning.
The broad-chested man, who was called Sam, clapped him on the back in approval.
"Dandy," he cried. "And that rock prevents any one seeing us from the village." Sam bent over the unconscious form and neatly trussed it up with rope. "The boss will be tickled to death over this. Stove in that rowboat, one of you."
A man with a boat hook smashed in some bottom boards and Jonathan Gibbs's dinghy slowly filled with water.
Then the motor boat put out of the bay, past the buoys, and headed north for Bar Harbor.
Bettington had recovered from the knockout within five minutes. He could see from the brightly polished brasswork and mahogany that he was in a yacht’s launch. He knew that the hum of the motor would make any call for help useless.
It Was a Mistake
He had been neatly knocked out and was now to be expeditiously shang-haied. So far as he knew he had no enemies. Although not a mixer with men, he was popular with those whom he knew.
Unlike Gibbons, he had no burning animosities. There were no dark passages in his life in which revengeful women figured. It was incredible. Then the real meaning of the thing flashed on him.
He was mistaken for Jonathan Gibbs. He was rowing Gibbs's boat and wearing his clothes. With a two-days' growth of beard and a face burned with sun, he might pass for him.
He called to mind the curious reception he had met in the shack. Gibbs was armed in readiness. Perhaps he had been expecting these very men.
