at one another to ask if such great good fortune
could, indeed, be ours.

I have told you before that the Italian was at our heels when we gained
the rock, and it was to him now that I addressed my question.

"You said there were two at the gate, Regnarte. Where are they, then,
and what keeps them?"

He cracked his bony fingers many times, and began to gabble away
vociferously in his own language--a tongue I like the sound of, but
which no right-minded man should talk. When he came to some calmness
and to a sane man's speech, he pointed to the pinnacles of the lesser
gate and began to make the truth clear to me.

"You come lucky, sir, you come lucky, true! Hafmitz gone yonder; he and
mate, too; he go to see why other men cry out!"

I saw it like a flash. The alarm had been given at the other end of the
reef, and the two that should have guarded this, had put out in their
boat to see what the matter was. If a man had wished to believe that
Providence guided him that night, he could not have found a
circumstance to help him farther on the road. I make no pretence to be
what folks call a religious man, doing my duty without the hymn-books;
but I believe, and always shall believe, that there was something more
than mere chance on our way in all that venture, and so I set it down
here once and for all. The fingers of the white man's God pointed the
road for us; and we took it, fair or crooked let it prove to be.

"Luck! Luck's no word for it, my lads," said I. "If a man told such a
thing ashore, who'd believe him? And yet it's true--true, as your own
eyes tell you."

They had not found their tongues yet and none of them uttered a
syllable. The wonders they had seen: that house of mystery lying like a
palace of the story-books far down below the rolling Pacific; the
surprise of it all; the picture of lights and rooms and of a woman's
face; and now this plateau of rock with breakers at their feet and the
island mists for their horizon; and, in the far distance, away upon the
sword-fish reef, sights and sounds which quickened every pulse--who
shall blame them if they could answer me never a word? They simply
halted there and gazed spellbound across the shimmering water. I alone
knew how far we stood from the end where safety lay.

Now, Peter Bligh was the first to give up his star-gazing; and, shaking
himself like a great dog, he turned to me with a word of that common
sense which he can speak sometimes.

"'Tis a mir