ere washed out, and the stream, no
longer confined, had cut a passage through the fill. On the opposite
side, the end of a rail projected and overhung. It showed rustily
through the creeping vines which overran it. Beyond, crouching by a
bush, a rabbit looked across at him in trembling hesitancy. Fully fifty
feet was the distance, but the arrow flashed true; and the transfixed
rabbit, crying out in sudden fright and hurt, struggled painfully away
into the brush. The boy himself was a flash of brown skin and flying fur
as he bounded down the steep wall of the gap and up the other side.
His lean muscles were springs of steel that released into graceful
and efficient action. A hundred feet beyond, in a tangle of bushes,
he overtook the wounded creature, knocked its head on a convenient
tree-trunk, and turned it over to Granser to carry.

[Illustration: Rabbit is good, very good 026]

"Rabbit is good, very good," the ancient quavered, "but when it comes to
a toothsome delicacy I prefer crab. When I was a boy--"

"Why do you say so much that ain't got no sense?" Edwin impatiently
interrupted the other's threatened garrulousness.

The boy did not exactly utter these words, but something that remotely
resembled them and that was more guttural and explosive and economical
of qualifying phrases. His speech showed distant kinship with that of
the old man, and the latter's speech was approximately an English that
had gone through a bath of corrupt usage.

"What I want to know," Edwin continued, "is why you call crab 'toothsome
delicacy'? Crab is crab, ain't it? No one I never heard calls it such
funny things."

The old man sighed but did not answer, and they moved on in silence.
The surf grew suddenly louder, as they emerged from the forest upon a
stretch of sand dunes bordering the sea. A few goats were browsing among
the sandy hillocks, and a skin-clad boy, aided by a wolfish-looking
dog that was only faintly reminiscent of a collie, was watching them.
Mingled with the roar of the surf was a continuous, deep-throated
barking or bellowing, which came from a cluster of jagged rocks a
hundred yards out from shore. Here huge sea-lions hauled themselves
up to lie in the sun or battle with one another. In the immediate
foreground arose the smoke of a fire, tended by a third savage-looking
boy. Crouched near him were several wolfish dogs similar to the one that
guarded the goats.

The old man accelerated his pace, sniffing eage