nd, he saw the boat--a white man boat, not a
canoe. He had good eyes. He had seen the boat, with the men at the oars;
and here Wang made a particular gesture over his eyes, as if his vision
had received a blow. He had turned at once and run to the house to
report.

"No mistake, eh?" said Heyst, moving on. At the very outer edge of the
belt he stopped short. Wang halted behind him on the path, till the
voice of Number One called him sharply forward into the open. He obeyed.

"Where's that boat?" asked Heyst forcibly. "I say--where is it?"

Nothing whatever was to be seen between the point and the jetty. The
stretch of Diamond Bay was like a piece of purple shadow, lustrous and
empty, while beyond the land, the open sea lay blue and opaque under the
sun. Heyst's eyes swept all over the offing till they met, far off, the
dark cone of the volcano, with its faint plume of smoke broadening and
vanishing everlastingly at the top, without altering its shape in the
glowing transparency of the evening.

"The fellow has been dreaming," he muttered to himself.

He looked hard at the Chinaman. Wang seemed turned into stone. Suddenly,
as if he had received a shock, he started, flung his arm out with a
pointing forefinger, and made guttural noises to the effect that there,
there, there, he had seen a boat.

It was very uncanny. Heyst thought of some strange hallucination.
Unlikely enough; but that a boat with three men in it should have sunk
between the point and the jetty, suddenly, like a stone, without leaving
as much on the surface as a floating oar, was still more unlikely. The
theory of a phantom boat would have been more credible than that.

"Confound it!" he muttered to himself.

He was unpleasantly affected by this mystery; but now a simple
explanation occurred to him. He stepped hastily out on the wharf. The
boat, if it had existed and had retreated, could perhaps be seen from
the far end of the long jetty.

Nothing was to be seen. Heyst let his eyes roam idly over the sea. He
was so absorbed in his perplexity that a hollow sound, as of somebody
tumbling about in a boat, with a clatter of oars and spars, failed to
make him move for a moment. When his mind seized its meaning, he had
no difficulty in locating the sound. It had come from below--under the
jetty!

He ran back for a dozen yards or so, and then looked over. His sight
plunged straight into the stern-sheets of a big boat, the greater part
of which was hid