le dreams,--vague recollections of
painful experiences,--torturing labor with aching muscles and blistered
hands; harsh words and ridicule from strong, bearded men; and running
through and between, the shadowy figures of blue-coated, brass-buttoned
men, continually ordering him on, and threatening arrest. The spectacle
of the night was as dream-like as the rest; for he remembered nothing
of the gunboat which had rescued and marooned him.

His face had lost its yellowish-bronze color, but was pale and
emaciated as ever, while his sunken eyes held the soft light which
always comes of extreme physical suffering. He was too weak to remain
on his feet, but in the effort to do so he spied the cask and bag
higher up on the beach and crawled to them. Prying a plug from the
bunghole with his knife, he found water, sweet and delicious, which he
drank by rolling the cask carefully and burying his lips in the
overflow. Evidently some one in authority on the gunboat had decreed
that he should not die of hunger or thirst, for the bag contained hard
bread.

Stronger after a meal, he climbed the highest sand-dune and studied the
situation. An outcropping of coral formed the backbone of the thin
crescent which held him, and which was about half a mile between the
points. To the south, opening out from the bay, was a clear stretch of
sea, green in the sunlight, deep blue in the shadows of the clouds, and
on the horizon were a few sails and smoke columns. West and east were
other sandy islets and coral reefs, and to the north a continuous line
of larger islands which might be inhabited, but gave no indication of
it.

Out in the bay, bobbing to the heave of the slight ground-swell, were
the three white buoys left by the Spaniards to mark the sunken boats
and slipped cable; and far away on the beach, just within the western
point, was something long and round, which rolled in the gentle surf
and glistened in the sunlight. He knew nothing of buoys, but they
relieved his loneliness; they were signs of human beings, who must have
placed him there with the bread and water, and who might come for him.

"Wonder if I got pinched again, and this is some new kind of a choky,"
he mused. "Been blamed sick and silly, and must ha' lost the job and
got jailed again. Just my luck! S'pose the jug was crowded and they run
me out here. Wish they'd left me a hat. Wonder how long I'm in for this
time."

He descended to the beach and found that repeated w