usiness.

There was an alarm of fire on shore. The bright glare of the flames
from the Hotel de Poisson penetrated the windows of a house near Dock
Vincent's, and lighted up the bed-chamber of a sleeping stone-cutter.
He gave the alarm; the bells rang, the engines rattled, and the whole
town was aroused from its peaceful slumbers. Hundreds of men, who had
worked hard all day, lost two hours of sleep for an old shanty which
was not worth five dollars.

The Hotel de Poisson was burned to the ground before many people had
gathered. Some good men thanked God that it had not been a poor man's
house; young men enjoyed the excitement of "running with the machine,"
and those with an eye for the picturesque were thankful that the
unsightly shanty had been removed from a place where it disfigured the
landscape. No one appeared to be sorry; but every one wondered how the
fire had caught. Various conjectures were suggested; but, after all, no
one knew anything about it. Some thought a straggler had used it as a
lodging, and set it on fire in lighting his pipe. Others thought some
bad boys had set the fire for fun.

If the two men who had met there to confer about their ill-gotten gold
were in the crowd, doubtless they were sadder and wiser men. Probably
they thought that the breaking of the lantern had communicated the
flame to the shanty. The people present knew nothing of the event in
the Hotel de Poisson wherein Mr. C. Augustus Ebenier had been the
principal actor. The finding of the half-melted remains of a lantern
had no significance or suggestiveness to them. The building burned up
clean, and there was nothing left of it but a few smoking timbers, and
a thin sprinkling of ashes on the ground and the rocks.

If the robbers, whoever they were, went to the fire, it is more than
likely that they searched eagerly among the ruins for the gold. If they
did, they saw nothing which looked like the fused coins of the
treasure. The old sail, in which the gold appeared to have been
concealed, or which had been thrown over its place of concealment, was
burned to tinder, and there was not a vestige of the bags or the money.

CHAPTER XIV.

"LOSE HIS OWN SOUL!"

The steward of The Starry Flag, after he had returned the dory to the
rocks, and secured the jolly-boat of the yacht, had an opportunity to
rest his fevered, mixed-up brain, and to consider his next step. The
four seamen of the schooner slept on shore, at their own ho