ed the troubled look on his face and asked:

"Do you know where we are?"

"No."

The shore was wild and rocky, and on their right it was covered with a
dense growth of tropical trees. Farther inland rose two towering
mountains. The beach directly before them was low and receding. A long,
level plain, covered with a dense growth of coarse sea-grass, was
between them and the hills, which were covered with palms, maguey and
other tropical trees.

John feared that they had been wrecked on the coast of some of the
Spanish possessions and would be made captives and perhaps slaves by the
half-civilized colonists.

They could not live long on the wreck, and he began to look about the
deck for some means of going ashore. The pinnace which had been stowed
away between decks was an almost complete wreck. It would have been
useless had it remained whole, for John and his companion could not
have launched it. There was a small boat hanging by the davits, which
had sustained no other injury than two holes in its side. He was a fair
carpenter, and getting some tools from the carpenter's chest, he mended
the boat. After no little trouble, he lowered the boat and, assisting
Blanche into it, pulled to the shore half a mile away.

It was a shore on which no human foot had ever trod. The great black
stones which lay piled in heaps along the coast to the northeast until
they were almost mountain-high forbade the safe approach of a vessel.
The entire coast was armed with bristling reefs to guard it against the
approach of wandering ships. It was almost miraculous that they had been
driven in between the reefs at the only visible opening. A hundred paces
in either direction their vessel would have been forced upon the rocks.

"Is this country inhabited?" asked Blanche, when they had landed, and
made fast their boat to a great stone.

"I fear not," he answered; "or, if inhabited, it is probably by
savages."

"Should that be true, ours will be a sad fate."

"I will not desert you," he answered.

They sat down on the dry white sand to rest and gazed at the wreck, with
its head high in the air and its stern low in the water.

"We made a mistake in not bringing some arms to defend ourselves
against savages or wild beasts," said John.

"Can we not go back for them?"

"Would you be afraid to remain on the beach while I went?" he asked.

She said she would not, though he noticed her cast nervous glances
toward the thickets and fore