and broken drifting clouds before it.

The two white men were now stooping over the peg, the negro man watching
them. Then presently the man with the cane started straight away from
the peg, carrying the end of a measuring line with him, the other end
of which the man with the plaited queue held against the top of the peg.
When the pirate captain had reached the end of the measuring line he
marked a cross upon the sand, and then again they measured out another
stretch of space.

So they measured a distance five times over, and then, from where Tom
lay, he could see the man with the queue drive another peg just at the
foot of a sloping rise of sand that swept up beyond into a tall white
dune marked sharp and clear against the night sky behind. As soon as
the man with the plaited queue had driven the second peg into the ground
they began measuring again, and so, still measuring, disappeared in
another direction which took them in behind the sand dune where Tom no
longer could see what they were doing.

The negro still sat by the chest where the two had left him, and so
bright was the moonlight that from where he lay Tom could see the glint
of it twinkling in the whites of his eyeballs.

Presently from behind the hill there came, for the third time, the sharp
rapping sound of the mallet driving still another peg, and then after a
while the two pirates emerged from behind the sloping whiteness into the
space of moonlight again.

They came direct to where the chest lay, and the white man and the black
man lifting it once more, they walked away across the level of open
sand, and so on behind the edge of the hill and out of Tom's sight.

III

Tom Chist could no longer see what the pirates were doing, neither did
he dare to cross over the open space of sand that now lay between
them and him. He lay there speculating as to what they were about, and
meantime the storm cloud was rising higher and higher above the horizon,
with louder and louder mutterings of thunder following each dull flash
from out the cloudy, cavernous depths. In the silence he could hear
an occasional click as of some iron implement, and he opined that the
pirates were burying the chest, though just where they were at work he
could neither see nor tell.

Still he lay there watching and listening, and by and by a puff of warm
air blew across the sand, and a thumping tumble of louder thunder leaped
from out the belly of the storm cloud, which every mi