my attention to something which in the hurry of
shore-going I might never have seen at all or thought about. It was
nothing less than this--that their fool's beacon was out to-night, and
all the sea about it as black as ink. Whoever set up the light, then,
did not use it for a seaman's benefit, but for his own whim. I reckoned
up the situation at a glance, and even at that early stage I began to
know the terrible meaning of it.

"Mister Jacob," said I, "those that keep that beacon are either fools
or knaves."

"Or both, sir," said he.

"Which one is the own brother to the other. Aye, captain, 'tis lucky
ye've the parish lantern, as my poor father used to say when----"

But Peter Bligh never finished it that night. The words were still in
his mouth when a rocket shot up over the sea and bursting in a cloud of
gold-blue sparks, cast a weird, cold light upon rock and reef and all
that troubled sea. And as the rocket fell our big carpenter, Seth
Barker, standing aft by the hatch, cries out,

"Ship ashore! Ship ashore, by----!"

CHAPTER V

STRANGE SIGHTS ASHORE, AND WHAT WE SAW OF THEM

Now, when Seth Barker cried out that a ship was ashore on the dangerous
reefs to the northward of the main island, it is not necessary to tell
you what we, a crew of British seamen, were called upon to do. The
words were scarcely spoken before I had given the order, "Stand by the
boats," and sent every man to his station. Excited the hands were, that
I will not deny; excited and willing enough to tell you about it if
you'd asked them; but no man among them opened his lips, and while they
stood there, anxious and ready, I had my glass to my eye and tried to
make out the steamer and what had befallen her. Nor was Mister Jacob
behind me, but he and Peter Bligh at my side, we soon knew the truth
and made up our minds about it.

"There's a ship on the reef, sure enough, and by the cut of her she's
the Santa Cruz we spoke this afternoon," said Mr. Jacob, and added, "a
dangerous shore, sir, a dangerous shore."

"But full of kind-hearted people that fire their guns at poor
shipwrecked mariners," put in Peter Bligh. I wouldn't believe him at
first, but there was no denying it, awful truth that it was, when a few
minutes had passed.

"Good God," cried I, "it can't be so, Peter, and yet that's a rifle's
tongue, or I've lost my hearing."

Well, we all stood together and listened as men listen for some poor
creature's death-cry, or the