There all was bleak, bold, barren; the walls of iron rock shot up with forbidding face to vast heights; there was no sign of track or path, of coast-guard or signal station; and away out to sea the needles of rocks whereon the yacht had foundered seemed alone in possession of the water. Beyond them and the line of sandy shallow the great rollers of the bay sported and foamed in long lines of green and white, and cast up fountains of glistening spray above the place of wreckage and the fateful reef. Truly a scene of desolation, and one which warranted the dumb despair of Messenger and his friend, and even the sleep of the weary lad.
Fisher, perhaps, would have slept all day had not Kenner, coming to some sense with the sun, aroused him before nine o'clock and pointed out the danger of his proceeding.
"I'll tell you what, youngster," said he, as the boy opened his eyes drowsily, "you aren't in Hyde Park, and this doesn't strike me as a particularly slap-up spot for camping. You'd got the sun full down on you."
"I must have had," said Fisher, rubbing his head woefully. "I feel as heavy as lead. Where's the Prince?"
Messenger rose at his words and came across to them.
"That's just what I'm asking myself," said he, as he sat down beside them, hatless, as they were, and half dressed, since most of his clothes were spread upon the beach to dry. "Where are we, and where are the rest of them?"
"Do you think that any of them lived besides ourselves?" asked Fisher earnestly.
"Lived!" said Kenner contemptuously; "how could they? By gosh! boy, if it hadn't been for you, Jake Kenner would be breakfasting wrong side up this morning!"
"Rot!" cried Fisher; "you'd have done the same for me."
The American went a little red in the face at this, for he knew that, had the positions and the power been reversed, Fisher would have gone down like a stone; but he checked his thought, and, holding out his hand, said simply—
"Shake, and if I live, look to me to stand by you. I wouldn't go through that night again not to get the gold back!"
At the word "gold" Fisher turned sympathetically to Messenger, and asked:
"Is some of the loss yours, Prince?"
"Yes," said Messenger, with a shrug; "Kenner and I are the chief sufferers."
"Won't some of the kegs wash ashore?" said Fisher next.
"I think not," replied Messenger, smiling for the first time. "Gold is a little heavier than flax, eh, Kenner?"
"I can't talk of it," said Kenner, turning away with the sigh of a broken man. "Every time I look away there it's like putting a knife in me. What an end!"
"It won't bear words," interposed Messenger suddenly; and then, without more talk, he began to pace the beach with long strides, pausing often to look seaward, or to bite at his finger-nails, as his habit was.
"He's thinking something out, I guess," said Kenner, as he watched him. "What he thinks out has generally got grit at the bottom of it."
"I wish he'd think out breakfast," said Fisher. "I don't know how you feel, but I've a void; and there doesn't seem much to eat here but cold rock and sea-weed."
"I've been of your opinion since you set me down," said Kenner feelingly; "I'd give a pound for a jug of wine."
"It would be the same thing if you'd give two," cried Fisher; "that is, if we stop here."
"If we stop here!" cried Kenner. "Wal, I'm fixed up, any road. I couldn't walk a mile if a hogshead of dollars was staked on it."
"Let's begin by drying ourselves, at any rate," continued Fisher. "The mariners in Horace hung up their clothes as an offering to the gods, you know. Here goes for the compliment!"
He stripped himself to the waist, and, making headgear of his handkerchief, he laid out his own clothes and those of Kenner in the glaring sun, and then, getting what shade he could from the overhanging crags, he said as a man who is satisfied—
"It occurs to me, Kenner, that if you played the Barmecide, and I played Shacabac, we might pass our time until the washing is dry. It looks as though it were going to be precious slow here; and I'm just as stiff as a lay-figure."
"You may knock me down in the same lot," cried Kenner with gusto; "what I can spell right here is thirst, and stroke the t's, too!"
"The first thing to do, don't you know," said Fisher, with his customary half-jocular readiness, "is to strike inland for a town, or, failing a town, for a village, or if we don't find either, why, then for an hotel. We've got some cash among us, surely, and directly we can put our hands on an English consul we'll make him send us home again. I'd give something to set foot in the Strand and breathe a real 'pea-soup' wouldn't you?"
Kenner, hunching himself up till he resembled a bundle, looked at the boy out of the corner of his ill-set eyes, and then chuckled. He was thinking that a good many people in London would be glad to have the acquaintance of the party just then. But he did not say anything; rather, he turned the conversation by pointing to Messenger.
"Where's he steering for?" he asked. "I never knew his double in my life you can't chain him, and you can't set him free; he's all wires and wheels, like a calculating machine! Look at him now striding along at six mile an hour, and halloaing at the hill to clear his lungs of salt; you'd think he'd got a patch in his head if you didn't know him."
"He's not halloaing at the hill," cried Fisher; "he's calling to someone. There's a man running along the sand, and it looks like old Burke! It is, too, as I'm alive! What luck!"
On this he began to dress, with a disregard for the niceties of the toilet which was admirable; and Kenner, taking heart that another lived, stood up on his feet, and lurched along with him toward the distant men. There was now no doubt of Burke's identity, for there he was with his rolling, reckless gait, his arms bare, and his head without a hat, coming swiftly over the sands toward them; and when he paused, it was to waken the hills with the echo of his resounding hail. At last he stood with Messenger, and they could see him pointing hurriedly toward the reef where the yacht had struck, or, again, to the bleak hills and the desert-like meadows. When they reached him, Kenner sank breathlessly upon the sand with the effort; but the skipper, curtly avoiding all greeting, continued his narration.
"What I've been tellin' 'em, Kenner," said he, "is ez we're only at the beginning of it. I'm not sure we're quite that fur, and I reckon the Prince is my way. The yaller stuff is under water right enough; but you're not wanting more'n decent eyes in your head to see that the aft end of the ship has been fixed right up in the cradle there, and that she's holding still. Maybe her timbers are knocked right out of her; maybe they ain't. If my judgment's worth a dollar, there's about six feet of water over the bar at low tide, and the kegs don't go for to travel far on a bottom like that. What we're wanting is a gig and a rope to begin on, and after that the dark to work in."
"Why the dark?" said Kenner, to whom night had become a terror. "Give me day, and take your dark to blazes!"
"He's quite right," said Messenger; "I've thought of that from the first. There must be some sort of coastguard here, and once we're sighted the thing will ring through Europe, and we'll have to listen