ot upon the iron, the thought in my head that madness sent me and that
I might never see another day.

No man appeared at the orifice, I say; the gate might have been
unguarded for any sentinel I could espy. Nevertheless, I knew that the
Italian spoke the truth, and that his reckoning was good. Edmond Czerny
was no fool to leave a sea-gate open to all the world. Somewhere on the
foothold of the rocks men were lurking, I made sure. That they heard
nothing of their friends' outcry in the corridor below, that they did
not answer it, was a thing I had not, at the first, understood; but it
became plain when the chimney I climbed shut out every sound but that
of the breaking seas, and gave intervals of silence so great that a man
might have heard a ticking watch. No, truly, it was no wonder that they
had not gone down nor heard that loud alarm, for they hungered for the
wreck; for pillage and plunder, and all the gruesome sights Ken's
Island that night could show them; and this hunger kept them at the
water's edge, hounds kennelled when others were free, unwilling idlers
on a harvest day. God knows, they paid a price for that when the good
time came.

Now, at the ladder's head, everything was as I had seen it in the
mind's picture; and even before I made the top fresh spray would shower
upon my face, while the sea sounded as though its waves were breaking
almost at my very ears. Unchallenged and, for all I could make out,
unwatched, I grew bolder step by step, until at last I touched the
topmost rung; and, looking over, I saw the white crests of the breakers
and the pinnacles of the reef and the distant island under its loom of
gold-blue fog. Halted there, with one hand swung free and my good
pistol ready, I peered intently into the night--a sentinel watching
sentinels, a spy upon those that should have spied. And standing so I
saw the men, and they saw me; and quickened to the act by the sudden
danger, I swung over the first half of the trap which shut the chimney
in, and made ready to close the second with all the deftness I could
command.

There were two men at the sea's edge, and they did not hear me, I
believe, until the first door of that trap was down. Perchance, even
then, they thought that a comrade played a jest upon them, and that
this was all in the night's work, for one of them coming up leisurely
peered into the hole and put a question to me in the German tongue.
This man, my heart beating like a piston, and