"I don't feel like work," said Schumer; "besides, I doubt if it would be any use. There's a huge, big storm coming, if I am not mistaken. I feel it in my skin, and I feel it in my nerves. I suppose it's the electricity in the air, but I believe I'd spark if you touched me with a bit of metal. Listen! There go the gulls again."
Away on the reef beyond the fishing ground, so far away that their voices came indistinctly on the windless air, the gulls were crying again, and, standing up, Floyd could see them in wild flight about the reef like scraps of blown white paper.
Then they rose higher, continued their argument, and began to recede.
"They are off," said Floyd; "going out seaward, the whole lot of them. By Jove, that looks like business!"
"They know what's coming," said Schumer, "and they are clearing out of the track. Wonder what tells them. Instinct, I suppose."
He set off to examine the cache, taking Floyd with him. He had covered the perishable stuff with sailcloth, and he now set to make the lashings more secure. They worked an hour, and when they came out again the sun had lost his brilliancy—a vague mist hid the horizon on every side.
In the northwest this thickness seemed more dense, and the sea, still glassing in and breaking in rhythmical thunder on the reef, had turned to the color of lead.
But for the noise of the surf the silence was now absolute and complete.
It held so till noon, when a wind began to stir the palm tops; a wind that seemed to come from nowhere, rocking them and tossing them hither and thither, making cat's-paws on the lagoon, and flicking at the tent canvas like a worrying hand.
Schumer took down the tent.