e surface. As he finished his work there was
another faint flash of light, and by and by another smothered rumble
of thunder, and Tom, as he looked out toward the westward, saw the
silver rim of the round and sharply outlined thundercloud rising
slowly up into the sky and pushing the other and broken drifting
clouds before it.

[Illustration: Kidd at Gardiner's Island

_Illustration from_
SEA ROBBERS OF NEW YORK

_by_ Thomas A. Janvier

_Originally published in_
HARPER'S MAGAZINE, _November, 1894_]

The two white men were now stooping over the peg, the negro man
watching them. Then presently the man with the cane started straight
away from the peg, carrying the end of a measuring line with him, the
other end of which the man with the plaited queue held against the top
of the peg. When the pirate captain had reached the end of the
measuring line he marked a cross upon the sand, and then again they
measured out another stretch of space.

So they measured a distance five times over, and then, from where Tom
lay, he could see the man with the queue drive another peg just at the
foot of a sloping rise of sand that swept up beyond into a tall white
dune marked sharp and clear against the night sky behind. As soon as
the man with the plaited queue had driven the second peg into the
ground they began measuring again, and so, still measuring,
disappeared in another direction which took them in behind the sand
dune where Tom no longer could see what they were doing.

The negro still sat by the chest where the two had left him, and so
bright was the moonlight that from where he lay Tom could see the
glint of it twinkling in the whites of his eyeballs.

Presently from behind the hill there came, for the third time, the
sharp rapping sound of the mallet driving still another peg, and then
after a while the two pirates emerged from behind the sloping
whiteness into the space of moonlight again.

They came direct to where the chest lay, and the white man and the
black man lifting it once more, they walked away across the level of
open sand, and so on behind the edge of the hill and out of Tom's
sight.

III

Tom Chist could no longer see what the pirates were doing, neither did
he dare to cross over the open space of sand that now lay between them
and him. He lay there speculating as to what they were about, and
meantime the storm cloud was rising higher and higher above the
horizon, with louder and louder mutterings