We are bound to get a turtle or two, anyway, if we
watch to-night on the beach."

Returning to the camp, they picked up their loaded Winchesters and
started off, walking along the beach on the inner side of the lagoon,
and going in a northerly direction. The islet, although less than a mile
and a half in circumference, was densely wooded and highly fertile, for
in addition to the countless coco-palms which were laden with nuts in
all stages of growth, and fringed the shore in an unbroken circle, there
were great numbers of pandanus and jackfruit-trees growing further back.
Here and there were to be seen traces of former inhabitants--depressions
of an acre or so in extent, surrounded by high banks of soil, now
thickly clothed with verdure, and which Chard, who had had a fair
experience of the South Seas, knew were once plantations of _puraka_,
the gigantic _taro_ plant of the low-lying islands of the South and
North Pacific.

"It must be a hundred years or more since any one worked at these
_puraka_ patches," he said to Hendry, as he sat upon the top of a bank
and looked down. "Look at the big trees growing all around us on the
banks. There can't be natives living anywhere on the atoll now, so I
don't think we need to keep a night watch as long as we stop here."

But had Harvey Carr or any one of the native crew sat there on the bank,
_they_ would have quickly discovered many evidences of the spot having
been visited very recently--the broken branch of a tree, a leaf basket
lying flattened and rotting, and half covered by the sandy soil; a
necklace of withered berries thrown aside by a native girl, and the
crinkled and yellowed husks of some young coconuts which had been drunk
not many weeks before by a fishing party.

At the extreme northern point of the islet there stood a mound of coral
slab, piled up by the action of the sea, and similar to the much
larger one fifteen miles away at the other end of the lagoon. With some
difficulty the two men succeeded in gaining the summit, and from there,
at a height of fifty feet, they had a view of the greater portion of the
atoll, and of some of the green chain of islands it enclosed. On no one
of them could they discern signs of human occupancy, only long, long
lines of cocos, with graceful slender boles leaning westward to the sea,
and whose waving crowns of plumes cast their shadows upon the white sand
beneath. From the beach itself to the barrier reef, a mile or two away,