med cast here in one mound, yet there were no sheep on the island,
and sheep are not carried as a rule in war canoes.

The sand on the beach was eloquent. The foot pursuing and the foot
pursued; the knee of the fallen one, and then the forehead and
outspread hands; the heel of the chief who has slain his enemy, beaten
the body flat, burst a hole through it, through which he has put his
head, and who stands absolutely wearing his enemy as a cloak; the head
of the man dragged on his back to be butchered like a sheep--of these
things spoke the sand.

As far as the sand traces could speak, the story of the battle was
still being told; the screams and the shouting, the clashing of clubs
and spears were gone, yet the ghost of the fight remained.

If the sand could bear such traces, and tell such tales, who shall say
that the plastic aether was destitute of the story of the fight and the
butchery?

However that may have been, Dick, looking around him, had the shivering
sense of having just escaped from danger. Whoever had been, had
gone--he could tell that by the canoe traces. Gone either out to sea,
or up the right stretch of the lagoon. It was important to determine
this.

He climbed to the hill-top and swept the sea with his eyes. There, away
to the south-west, far away on the sea, he could distinguish the brown
sails of two canoes. There was something indescribably mournful and
lonely in their appearance; they looked like withered leaves--brown
moths blown to sea--derelicts of autumn. Then, remembering the beach,
these things became freighted with the most sinister thoughts for the
mind of the gazer. They were hurrying away, having done their work.
That they looked lonely and old and mournful, and like withered leaves
blown across the sea, only heightened the horror.

Dick had never seen canoes before, but he knew that these things were
boats of some sort holding people, and that the people had left all
those traces on the beach. How much of the horror of the thing was
revealed to his subconscious intelligence, who can say?

He had climbed the boulder, and he now sat down with his knees drawn
up, and his hands clasped round them. Whenever he came round to this
side of the island, something happened of a fateful or sinister nature.
The last time he had nearly lost the dinghy; he had beached the little
boat in such a way that she floated off, and the tide was just in the
act of stealing her, and sweeping her from the