wood that we had collected was exhausted. I thought that I would
gather more, and build up the fire against the time when the others
should awake. The driftwood lay in greatest quantity some distance up
the beach, against a low ridge of sand dunes. Beyond these the islet
tapered off to a long gray point of sand and shell. Walking toward this
point in the first pale light of dawn, I chanced to raise my eyes, and
beheld riding at anchor beyond the spit of sand a ship.

I stopped short and rubbed my eyes. She lay there on the sleeping ocean
like a dream ship, her masts and rigging black against the pallid sky,
the mist that rested upon the sea enfolding half her hull. She might
have been of three hundred tons burthen; she was black and two-decked,
and very high at poop and forecastle, and she was heavily armed. My eyes
traveled from the ship to the shore, and there dragged up on the point,
the oars within it, was a boat.

At the head of the beach, beyond the line of shell and weed, the sand
lay piled in heaps. With these friendly hillocks between me and the sea,
I crept on as silently as I might, until I reached a point just above
the boat. Here I first heard voices. I went a little further, then
knelt, and, parting the long coarse grass that filled the hollow between
two hillocks, looked out upon two men who were digging a grave.

They dug in a furious hurry, throwing the sand to left and right, and
cursing as they dug. They were powerful men, of a most villainous cast
of countenance, and dressed very oddly. One with a shirt of coarsest
dowlas, and a filthy rag tying up a broken head, yet wore velvet
breeches, and wiped the sweat from his face with a wrought handkerchief;
the other topped a suit of shreds and patches with a fine bushy ruff,
and swung from one ragged shoulder a cloak of grogram lined with
taffeta. On the ground, to one side of them, lay something long and
wrapped in white.

As they dug and cursed, the light strengthened. The east changed from
gray to pale rose, from rose to a splendid crimson shot with gold. The
mist lifted and the sea burned red. Two boats were lowered from the
ship, and came swiftly toward the point.

"Here they are at last," growled the gravedigger with the broken head
and velvet breeches.

"They've taken their time," snarled his companion, "and us two here
on this d-d island with a dead man the whole ghost's hour. Boarding a
ship's nothing, but to dig a grave on the land before c