"But, if the State is a kind of devil," said the sailor, who was a bit of a logician himself, "I prefer my friends, who in the meantime are being suffocated."
"That is a fallacy," the professor was answering. Then, from the direction of the house, there came a confused sound of shouting.
A fourth sailor came tearing down the beach like a maniac.
"Where are the clam-fishers?" he called to the three philosophers. "They are to be taken, dead or alive."
At the same moment, I saw the glint of the sun on the revolvers of several other men, who were advancing through the woods towards the beach, peering to right and left of them. Without a whisper between us, Duncan and I crawled off along the cliff, through the thick undergrowth.
Obviously, the submarine had come to the surface again, and the whole merry crowd was on our track. The island was not more than a quarter of a mile in diameter; and I saw no hope of evading our pursuers, of whom there must be at least twenty, judging from the cries that reached us. There was nothing for it, but to choose the best place for putting up a fight; and, as luck would have it, we were already on the best line of defense. The undergrowth between the cliff's edge and the woods was so thick that nobody could discover us, except by crawling up the trail by which we had ourselves entered. It proved to be the only way by which the cliff's edge could be explored, and we had a full half-mile of the island's circumference, a long ledge, only a few feet wide, on which we could crawl in security for the time being, till the hunt came up behind us. I remember noticing—even in those moments of peril—that the ground and the bushes were littered with big crab claws and clam shells that had been dropped and picked there by the sea gulls and crows; and I was thinking—in some queer way—of the easy life that these birds lead, when I almost put my hand on a human skull, protruding from a litter of loose earth, white flakes of shell and crabs' backs. Duncan pulled a heap of the evil-smelling stuff away with his clam-rake, and bared the right side of the skeleton. There was a half-rotten clam-rake in the bony clutch of the dead man. Evidently, somebody else had paid the penalty before us. The body had been buried, and rain, snow, or the insatiable sea-gulls had uncovered the yellow-toothed head.
A few yards further on, the cliff projected so far out that even when one hung right over the edge, it was only just possible to see where it met the swirling water, which seemed very deep here. About fifteen yards out, there was a big boulder of rock, covered with brown sea-weed.
"Look here, Duncan," I said, "there's only one real chance for us. We've got to swim to the mainland, but we can't do it by daylight. We've got to pass six hours till it's dark enough, and there's only one way to do it. How far can you swim under water?"
"About fifty feet," he said. "You're going crazy, old man, it's a mile and a half to the mainland."
"Duncan, you're a devil of a man for getting into a scrape. But when it comes to getting out of one, I feel a little safer in my own hands. Can you get as far as that rock under water?"