Hislop now directed that one of our number should guard the hut by night, and a second the boat, with orders to hail each other in this fashion:
"Boat, ahoy!"
"Hut, ahoy!"
This was to insure a watchful look-out; but with all these precautions, wise and necessary though they were, our feeling of security, and even of reliance on each other, was gone for the time.
As these occurrences excited the imagination of our companions, some of those who watched the hut and boat by night, asserted that when all our party, save themselves, were safely lodged and asleep, something like the figure of a very tall man had appeared for an instant on the bluffs that overhung the sea, between them and the moonlight.
But of this mysterious personage, if such existed anywhere, except in the overstrained imagination of a lonely midnight watcher, we could discover no trace during day.
One night, when Francis Probart and Ned Carlton were on watch, a sound like the distant report of a pistol was heard by them, and at the same instant, both saw a flock of petrels and storm-finches rise up in the moonlight from the face of a bluff, where they revolved above the breakers, like a swarm of gnats in a sunbeam.
So if Ned and the carpenter were mistaken in the sound, the birds were also roused and alarmed.
Marc Hislop ridiculed their story, but he was considerably bewildered, and so were we all when two days after, a seaman named Hugh Chute, when rambling in the woods, found one of our goats, which we knew by the fragment of rope still tied round its neck, lying dead, with a bullet in its throat!
He brought it to the hut, where the wound was cut open, and the bullet extracted. It was small, and had evidently been fired from a pistol; this event caused the most exciting speculations, amid which the carcass was hastily buried, as not one of us would eat of it.