d a good
many irons in the fire--too many and some of them far too hot, as it
turned out--and I suppose they left this little affair until an
opportune moment. Without a doubt, not so long after I'd told them the
story, Salter Quick scratched inside the lid of his tobacco-box a
rough diagram of the place I'd mentioned, with the latitude and
longitude approximately indicated--that's the box there's been so much
fuss about, I read in the papers, and I'll tell you more about it in
due process. But now about that island and the Quicks, and how they
and the rest of us got out of it. I told you that the centre of this
island rose to a high peak, separating one coast from the other--well,
one day, when we'd been marooned for several weary weeks and there
didn't seem the least chance of rescue, I, my French friend, and the
Chinaman crossed the shoulder of that peak and went along the other
coast, prospecting--more out of sheer desperation than in the hope of
finding anything. We spent the next night on the other side of the
island, and it was not until late on the following afternoon that we
returned to our camp, if you can call that a camp which was nothing
but a hole in the rocks. And we got back to find Noah and Salter Quick
gone--and we knew how they had gone when the Chinaman's sharp eyes
made out a sail vanishing over the horizon. Some Chinese fishing-boat
had made that island in our absence, and these two skunks had gone
away in her and left us, their companions, to shift for ourselves.
That's the sort the Quicks were!--those were the sort of tricks they'd
play off on so-called friends! Do you wonder, either of you, that both
Noah and Salter eventually got--what they got?"

We made no answer to that beyond, perhaps, a shake of our heads. Then
Miss Raven spoke.

"But--you got away, in the end?" she suggested.

"We got away in the end--some time later, when we were about done
for," assented Baxter, "and in the same way--a Chinese fishing-boat
that came within hail. It landed us on the Kiang-Su coast, and we had
a pretty bad time of it before we made our way to Shanghai. From that
port we worked our passage to Hong-Kong: I had an idea that we might
strike the Quicks there, or get news of them. But we heard nothing of
those two villains, at any rate. But we did hear that the _Elizabeth
Robinson_ had never reached Chemulpo--she'd presumably gone down with
all hands, and we were supposed, of course, to have gone down with