"Nearly a month. A tramp steamer, blown out of its course between Colon and La Guaira by a hurricane, saw our signals and took us off."
She glanced over her shoulder apprehensively.
"There are no—no savages, are there?" she shuddered.
I shook my head. "Hardly; not in the twentieth century. For that matter, I doubt if there ever were any. The place isn't big enough to support much of a population."
We were walking again now, keeping to the hard sands, and turning our backs resolutely upon the vanishing white phantom which was the ship that was deserting us.
"There are eighteen of us," Conetta said, after a time. "Doesn't that mean starvation, sooner or later?"
"There were six of us who were washed ashore from the Mary Jane," I said. "We lived on shell fish and cocoanuts—just barely, as you might say. There is a tradition that we were not the first, and that the others, the crew of a Spanish treasure ship marooned by the old English sea rovers, did starve."
"Heavens!" she breathed. "The place ought to be full of ghosts! But you don't believe those terrible old tales, do you?"
"They were true enough, doubtless; but we needn't go out of our way to localize them. In the present instance——" I was about to tell her of the remains of the ancient wreck farther down the beach, but I thought better of it and switched—"in the present instance we are not going to starve, for a while, at least. The mutineers have given us a fighting chance by dividing the ship's stores with us. Didn't you hear the launch going back and forth before you were taken off?"
"Yes, I heard it," she acknowledged. "That must have been part of the plan, too." Then she stopped and faced me suddenly. "Where was Bonteck while all the rest of us were being hustled out of the way?"