wide view of the
lagoon, the bounding reef, the round horizon. Nearer hand I saw the
sister islet, the wreck, the _Norah Creina_, and the _Norah's_ boat
already moving shoreward. For the sun was now low, flaming on the sea's
verge; and the galley chimney smoked on board the schooner.

It thus befell that though my discovery was both affecting and
suggestive, I had no leisure to examine further. What I saw was the
blackened embers of fire of wreck. By all the signs, it must have blazed
to a good height and burned for days; from the scantling of a spar that
lay upon the margin only half consumed, it must have been the work of
more than one; and I received at once the image of a forlorn troop of
castaways, houseless in that lost corner of the earth, and feeding there
their fire of signal. The next moment a hail reached me from the boat;
and bursting through the bushes and the rising sea-fowl, I said farewell
(I trust for ever) to that desert isle.

CHAPTER XVI

IN WHICH I TURN SMUGGLER, AND THE CAPTAIN CASUIST

The last night at Midway I had little sleep; the next morning, after the
sun was risen, and the clatter of departure had begun to reign on deck,
I lay a long while dozing; and when at last I stepped from the
companion, the schooner was already leaping through the pass into the
open sea. Close on her board, the huge scroll of a breaker unfurled
itself along the reef with a prodigious clamour; and behind I saw the
wreck vomiting into the morning air a coil of smoke. The wreaths already
blew out far to leeward, flames already glittered in the cabin skylight,
and the sea-fowl were scattered in surprise as wide as the lagoon. As we
drew farther off, the conflagration of the _Flying Scud_ flamed higher;
and long after we had dropped all signs of Midway Island, the smoke
still hung in the horizon like that of a distant steamer. With the
fading out of that last vestige, the _Norah Creina_ passed again into
the empty world of cloud and water by which she had approached; and the
next features that appeared, eleven days later, to break the line of
sky, were the arid mountains of Oahu.

It has often since been a comfortable thought to me that we had thus
destroyed the tell-tale remnants of the _Flying Scud_; and often a
strange one that my last sight and reminiscence of that fatal ship
should be a pillar of smoke on the horizon. To so many others besides
myself the same appearance had played a part in the various s