"Well?" I queried.
"I forgot to say that when I went to look for those fellows the next morning, I didn't find any of these rope lashings. They didn't leave even that much of a trace of themselves when they made off."
"Well?" I said again.
"I suppose you are pretty well convinced by this time that the Andromeda came back and took them off, and so am I. Taking that view of it, you'll know what it means when I tell you that I found this piece of knotted rope in the bushes a few yards from our camp—lost out of somebody's pocket, for a guess."
Truly, I did know. It meant that the Andromeda had come a second time, and that, in addition to rescuing the survivors of the yawl's crew, the rescuing party had crept up upon us; had been near enough to massacre the lot of us as we slept after the strenuous exertions of the forepart of the night.
"Um," said I; "why didn't they kill us all off while the killing was good? Perhaps you can answer me that."
"There may have been reasons. Possibly the landing party—the second one—wasn't big enough to attempt it with safety. Besides, what was the use of their troubling themselves when the lapse of a little time would take the job off their hands?"
Here was a ready explanation for all that had happened, or hadn't happened, since the night of the storm. The mutineers were merely giving us time to starve to death. Their spying expedition had doubtless shown them that our stores were gone, and they could easily argue that in a few days we, too, would be gone—at least gone past the point at which we could interfere with anything they wished to do on the island.
It was on a crabbing expedition when, as it chanced, I was paired with the youngest of the Van Tromp trio, that Edith asked a question which I knew must be trembling continually upon the lips of every woman in our forlorn company.
"How long can it last, Uncle Dick? How long can we live on just cocoanuts and hope, after the horrid great oysters are all gone, and these creepy, leggy crabs have grown too cunning to let us catch them?"