(without father's knowledge), to make restoration for
his sake.

All that day I neither saw nor heard more of
the supercargo. I passed a miserable night of
it, after writing my memorandum, fighting with
my loneliness and my own thoughts. The
remembrance of those words in father's will, saying
that the five hundred pound was money which he
had once run a risk with, kept putting into my
mind suspicions I was ashamed of. When
daylight came, I almost felt as if I was going to
have the Horrors too, and got up to walk them
off, if possible, in the morning air.

I kept on the northern side of the island,
walking backwards and forwards for an hour or
more. Then I returned to my cavern; and the
first thing I saw, on getting near it, was other
footsteps than mine marked on the sand. I
suspected at once that the supercargo had been
lurking about watching me, instead of going
back to his own side; and that, in my absence,
he had been at his thieving tricks again.

The stores were what I looked at first. The
food he had not touched; but the water he had
either drunk or wasted—there was not half a
pint of it left. The medicine-chest was open,
and the bottle with the hartshorn was gone.
When I looked next for the pistol, which I had
loaded with powder and shot for the chance of
bird-shooting that never came, the pistol was
gone too. After making this last discovery,
there was but one thing to be done—namely—
to find out where he was, and to take the pistol
away from him.

I set off to search first on the western side.
It was a beautiful clear, calm, sunshiny morning;
and as I crossed the island, looking out on
my left hand and my right, I stopped on a
sudden, with my heart in my mouth, as the
saying is. Something caught my eye, far out at
sea, in the north-west. I looked again—and
there, as true as the heavens above me, I saw
a ship, with the sunlight on her topsails, hull
down, on the water-line in the offing!

All thought of the errand I was bent on, went
out of my mind in an instant. I ran as fast
as my weak legs would carry me to the northern
beach; gathered up the broken wood which was
still lying there plentifully, and, with the help
of the dry scrub, lit the largest fire I had made
yet. This was the only signal it was in my
power to make that there were men on the
island. The fire, in the bright daylight, would
never be visible to the ship; but the smoke
curling up from it, in the clear sky, might be
seen, if they had a look-out at the mast-head.

While I was still feeding the fire, and so
wrapped up in doing it, that I had neither eyes
nor ears for anything else, I heard the
supercargo's voice on a sudden at my back. He had
stolen on me along the sand. When I faced
him, he was swinging his arms about in the air,
and saying to himself over and over again, "I
see the ship! I see the ship!"

After a little, he came close up to me. By
the look of him, he had been drinking the hartshorn,
and it had strung him up a bit, body and
mind, for the time. He kept his right hand
behind him, as if he was hiding something. I
suspected that "something " to be the pistol I
was in search of.

"Will the ship come here?" says he.

"Yes, if they see the smoke," says I, keeping
my eye on him.

He waited a bit, frowning suspiciously, and
looking hard at me all the time.

"What did I say to you yesterday?" he
asked.

"What I have got written down here," I
made answer, smacking my hand over the
writing-case in my breast-pocket; "and what
I mean to put to the proof, if the ship sees us
and we get back to England."

He whipped his right hand round from behind
him, like lightning; and snapped the pistol at
me. It missed fire. I wrenched it from him
in a moment, and was just within one hair's
breadth of knocking him on the head with the
butt-end, afterwards. I lifted my hand—then
thought better, and dropped it again.

"No," says I, fixing my eyes on him steadily;
"I'll wait till the ship finds us."

He slunk away from me; and, as he slunk,
looked hard into the fire. He stopped a minute
so, thinking to himself—then he looked back at
me again, with some mad mischief in him, that
twinkled through his blue spectacles, and grinned
on his dry black lips.

"The ship shall never find you" he said.
With which words, he turned himself about
towards his own side of the island, and left me.

He only meant that saying to be a threat—
but, bird of ill-omen that he was, it turned out
as good as a prophecy! All my hard work with
the fire proved work in vain; all hope was
quenched in me, long before the embers I had
set light to were burnt out. Whether the smoke
was seen or not from the vessel, is more than I
can tell. I only know that she filled away on
the other tack, not ten minutes after the supercargo
left me. In less than an hour's time the
last glimpse of the bright topsails had vanished
out of view.

I went back to my cavern—which was now
likelier than ever to be my grave as well. In
that hot climate, with all the moisture on the
island dried up, with not quite so much as a
tumbler-full of fresh water left, with my strength
wasted by living on half-rations of food two
days more at most would see me out. It was
hard enough for a man at my age, with all that
I had left at home to make life precious, to die
such a death as was now before me. It was
harder still to have the sting of death sharpened
—as I felt it, then—by what had just happened
between the supercargo and myself. There was
no hope, now, that his wanderings, the day
before, had more falsehood than truth in them.
The secret he had let out was plainly true enough
and serious enough to have scared him into
attempting my life, rather than let me keep
possession of it, when there was a chance of the
ship rescuing us. That secret had father's good
name mixed up with it—and here was I, instead