Following the sands for a short distance, they turned into what had once been a trail. The party halted looking upward to the place that was to be their home.
A mere thread of a footpath, almost blotted out by tall grasses, led gently up the slope for sixty yards to where, above a natural hedge of celery blooms, a little cabin of weather-beaten drift-logs cuddled at the foot of a steep, green hill. A porch jutted out in front, spindling uprights supporting the slanting roof. To the right, farther down and half hidden in the grass, lay the remains of a board shack which had fallen in. There was a sound of trickling water in some hidden place. The sun fell warmly in this sheltered nook, bringing out the scent of green things; and over all was that melancholy stillness which envelopes human dwellings long deserted.
The boom of breakers far out on the reefs was hushed to a soothing hum, and faintly, from the reedy little lake farther down on the southward slope came the quacking of wild ducks. To the north and south and west lay the open sea, and as far as the eye could reach was no sight of land.
Jean broke her wide-eyed silence with a whisper:
"It's under a spell, Ellen, sure as you live." . . . She continued aloud: "Look at that quaint old latch on the door—made of a piece of drift-wood. And see the— Oh! Shane!" Incredulity and fear shrilled in her voice—"Shane! Why, it's moving!" She grasped her brother-in-law's arm as she pointed to the door of the cabin.
It was true. The door was opening slowly, jerkily, in a way that hinted of fearsome, because unknown things. The next instant there stepped out of the opening a tall, shock-haired young man, naked, except for some tatters of an undershirt and a piece of old canvas wound about his hips after the fashion of a South Sea pareu.
CHAPTER XIV
THE CASTAWAY
Kayak Bill was the first to find voice.
"By the roarin' Jasus,"—his tones trembled with enormous astonishment—"if it ain't young Harlan!"