any hour may bring a changing wind and a breaking
sea, and a shore rockbound and unattainable. They are playing with
chance, and chance will turn upon them presently. Let them make for the
island where the laughing woods say "Come!" and the heralds of sleep
will touch them upon the foreheads, and raving, dreaming, they will
fall at last, just victims of the island visions. Say that their brute
intelligences do not yet understand this; but hunger and thirst will
teach them ere the dawn, and then reckoning must come!

All this I foresaw as we let the boat drift by the sandy bays, and
spake, one to another, of to-morrow and that which it must bring.
Whatever our own misfortune might be, that of Czerny's men was worse a
hundredfold. For the moment it amused them to see the shells plunging
and hissing in the sea about us; for the moment the desire to be quit
of us made them forget how it stood with them and what must come after.
But the reckoning would be sure. Let a capful of wind come scudding
across that glassy sea, and all the riches in the world would not buy
Edmond Czerny's life of these sea-wolves who sought it.

"They'll stand by until they know the worst, and then nothing will hold
them," I said to my comrades. "If they think they can get aboard the
yacht, they'll do so and make for some safe port. If not, they'll try
to rush the house. Assume that they are driven hard enough and no gun
will keep them off. Let ten or twenty go down, the rest will come in. I
am thinking that we should get back to the house, lads, and not leave
it to younger heads. We've done what we could here, and it's plainly
useless to go on with it!"

They were all with me in this, none more so than Captain Nepeen, who,
up to this time, had been for the shore and the friends who might be
found there.

"At least we have made every prudent effort; and there are others to
think of," said he. "If they had a gunner worth a groat, we should not
be where we are, captain. You must allow something to chance and a
lucky shot. They may get home even yet. I will not ask you what that
would mean, for you are a seaman and you know."

His words, I think, recalled us to the danger. No hope of rescue
rewarded our eyes when we scanned the black woods and the lonely
fore-shore of the forbidden land. Dark and terrible in the moonlight,
like some mighty beacon of evil rising up above that sleeping sea, it
seemed to say to us, "Go, turn back; remember those who