The two men went out of the palisade and crossed the clearing. Then they slid from tree to tree for a couple of hundred yards, listening, and peering, until they reached the narrow cutting between the last rocks, against which the waves broke.
The beach was deserted, and so was the sea as far as the cape, the outlines of which could just be seen in the eastward. There were no lights either in the direction of Rock Castle, or on the surface of Deliverance Bay. A single mass of rock loomed up a couple of miles out at sea.
It was Shark’s Island.
“Come on,” said Fritz.
“Ay, ay,” John Block replied.
They went down to the sandy shore, whence the tide was receding.
They would have shouted for joy if they had dared. A canoe was there, lying on its side.
It was the pirogue which the battery had greeted with a couple of shots from its guns.
“A lucky thing that they missed it!” John Block exclaimed. “If they hadn’t, it would be at the bottom now. If it was Mr. Jack or Mr. Ernest who was such a bad shot, we will offer him our congratulations!”
This little boat, of native construction and worked by paddles, could only hold five or six people. Captain Gould and his party numbered eight, and a child, to be rowed to Shark’s Island. True, the distance was only a bare two miles.