It was falling dusk and the tide had been running ebb two or three hours when they beat in under the lee side of one of the islands they had passed on a previous occasion on their way to the settlement. After anchoring the sloop where she would lie afloat at low water some distance off the beach they got into the canoe and paddling ashore crossed the island, which was small and narrow. It was covered with thin underbrush and dwarf firs, and on its opposite side a broad stretch of wet sand and shingle with pools and creeks in it stretched back toward the channel, which cut it off from the mainland.
To the eastward, the pale silver sickle of a crescent moon hung low in the sky, but westward a wide band of flaring crimson and saffron still burned beneath dusky masses of ragged cloud and the uncovered sands gleamed blood-red in the fading glow. A cold wind stirred the pines to an eerie sighing, and the splash of a tiny surf came up faintly from the outer edge of the sands. The whole scene struck Frank as very forbidding and desolate, and he fancied that there was a threat of wind in the sky. Something in the loneliness troubled him, and for no particular reason he felt half sorry that he had come. He realized that it would have been much more cozy in the sloop's cabin than upon that dreary beach, and he said something about the weather to Harry.
"We'll be sheltered here if the breeze does come up, and this looks just the place where we ought to get a duck," his companion answered. "There aren't many spots like it around this part of the coast, where we've generally deeper water. Perhaps we'd better move on a little nearer yonder clump of firs. They'll hide us from any birds that come sailing down to the flats."
"What's the matter with the dog?" Frank asked. "What's he snuffing at?"
The animal was trotting about with his nose upon the ground and would not come when they called him.
"I don't know," said Harry carelessly. "Perhaps somebody's been across the island lately, though I don't think it's often a white man lands here."
They took up their stations a little apart from each other among some very rough boulders, with the nearest of the firs on a rocky ridge some thirty or forty yards away from them. Their ragged branches cut in a sharp ebony pattern against the sky, which was duskily blue. It was very cold and the wind seemed fresher, for the trees were rustling and moaning, and the calling of distant wildfowl came up through the increasing murmur of the surf.
Frank's boots had suffered from hard wear in the bush, and, as he had stumbled into a pool, his feet were very wet, but he crouched behind a boulder, clutching the single-barreled gun with cold fingers, and watching the sky beyond the fir tops, for what seemed a considerable time. Nothing moved across it except a long wisp of torn-edged cloud, and he was commencing to wonder whether it would not be better to go back to the sloop when Harry called softly, and he heard a new sound in the darkness somewhere beyond the firs. It suggested the regular movement of a row of fans, which was the best comparison that occurred to him, for there was a kind of measured beat in it, and in another few moments he recognized it as the rhythmic stroke of wings. Then a double line of dark bodies spreading out from a point in the shape of a wedge appeared close above him against the sky.
He saw that they had long necks, but that was all, for they were coming on with an extraordinary swiftness. There was a crash as Harry's gun flung a streak of red fire into the darkness. Then Frank pitched up the single barrel, pulling hard upon the trigger as the butt struck his shoulder. He felt the jar of it and saw a whirling blaze, after which he swung around when Harry's gun flashed again.
The wedge, which had scattered, was reuniting. He could just see it dotted upon the sky, but he fancied that one dark object had come whirling down and struck the flats outshore of him a few seconds earlier.