ing the savages
through his glasses, and he had distinctly seen the ship's name painted
on a small water-cask on which the Indian had been sitting. Tollemache
made the same dramatic discovery.

"Out of one of the ship's life-boats, I suppose?" he said in a low tone
to the captain.

"Yes. Did you see the number?"

"Number 3, I think."

"I agree with you. That was the first life-boat which got away."

Christobal, startled out of his wonted sang-froid, whispered in his
turn:

"Do you mean to say that one of the boats has fallen into the hands of
these fiends?"

"I am afraid so," replied Courtenay. "Of course, that particular keg
may have drifted ashore. In any case, it tells the fate of one section
of the mutineers. Either the boat is swamped, or the crew are now on
the island, and we know what that signifies."

"Is there no chance of bribing these people into friendliness, or, at
least, into a temporary truce?"

"It is hard to decide. Tollemache and Suarez are best able to form an
opinion. What do you say, Tollemache?"

"Not a bit of use; they are insatiable. The more you give the more
they want. The only way to deal with those rotters is to stir them up
with a Gatling or a twelve-pounder."

Suarez, when appealed to, shook his head.

"Last winter," he said, "the man sitting aft, he with the single
albatross feather sticking in his hair, seized his own son, aged six,
and dashed his brains out on the rocks because the little fellow
dropped a basket of sea-eggs he was carrying. The woman nearest to him
is his wife, and she raised no protest. You might as well try to
fondle a hungry puma. I am the only man they have ever spared, and
they spared me solely because they thought I gave them power over their
enemies. If you had a cannon, you might drive them off. As it is, we
shall be compelled to fight for our lives; they are brave enough in
their own way."

The experience of the miner from Argentina was not to be gainsaid. The
predicament of the giant _Kansas_--inert, immovable, lying in that
peaceful bay at the mercy of a horde of painted savages--was one of the
strange facts almost beyond credence which men encounter at times in
the byways of life. It reminded Courtenay of a visit he paid to the
crocodile tank at Karachi when he was a midshipman on the _Boadicea_.
He noticed that some of the huge saurians, eighteen feet in length and
covered with scale armor off which a bullet would glance, w