dark as a tropic moon in its second quarter will admit—and from the approach of dusk he had timed his return so that when the crucial moment came barely a glimmer of unnecessary light should favor a possible attack by the terrible brutes. Luckily the night, though moonlit, had the edge shorn from its brilliance by a singularly fortunate haze, or rather solidity of the atmosphere, that had for some hours been imperceptibly gathering. Indeed, the weather-wise eye of the solitary man had almost unconsciously sensed its presence and the peculiar greenish hue of the blurred horizon, and with a moody shake of life head he had muttered, "Something dirty brewing, or I'm no sailorman," a premonition of impending trouble quickly submerged in the more pressing and greater peril.
Within fifty feet of the black mass of low bluff and wall of jungle he had stopped softly the way of the craft, which was now drifting very slowly shoreward. Now that a dead calm had succeeded the blow, only the ceaseless mournful swish of the miniature breakers broke the profound silence of the sultry darkness, and Manton's whistle had sounded as though its author might well have been imagined within hand's grasp of the craft's stent, and the voice that called quietly held the same queer acoustic quality.
"It's all right, Haynes!" said the invisible speaker. "I ain't heard a thing since sundown. Keep right on the way you are; if I hear a sound I'll hail you."
"Right, but you might swim out a little way, these blasted sculls creak so—might roust them out," came the reply in a querulous and irritable whisper, as after a couple of cautious strokes the speaker Jay on his oars. "Come out! I ain't no fish, and you know it, Haynes!" cried title voice in the darkness very sharply and even angrily.
"For Cod's sake don't talk so loud! Do you want the whole bunch down on us?" said Haynes fiercely in a tremulous whisper. "Anyway you've got to take to the water; I ain't going to shove one of these bloody rocks through her for no one," he added more soberly and firmly.
"Rocks?—that's so, you're right. I can wade out waist-deep anyhow, and you come in that far—go slow and you'll be all right," called back Manton, his wrath appeased at this natural and seamanlike explanation.
"Say when," said Haynes nervously, and after a second's pause, "Here goes! come right in," came instantly a hoarse whisper, and immediately followed a slight rustling of the brush, succeeded by a hasty stumbling step over the boulders that strewed the beach at the spot, and in a second the sound of a heavy body splashing through the water. Even then the man in the boat sat motionless, his body strained forward, intently listening and fearfully hesitant. He sat still as a figure of stone, until another sound burst into the silent, stifling night; a sound that galvanized the seated figure with a violent tremor. A dreaded resonance so horrifying in its malignant promise that for a moment he was incapable of speech or voluntary movement. Nor did Manton's loud hail restore his shattered mentality.
"Haynes! they're on the move! Come in quick before they scent us! They're over the bush. Quick?" he cried loudly, abandoning all caution in the extreme peril of his position.
But no response came from the dark blotch which even his keen vision with difficulty identified as their craft—for now the strange murk had almost obscured the moonlight, and the nearest objects were but darker blurs of indeterminate nature. At
