"The sleep and rest made new men of us, and, when we awoke at sunrise we were, physically at least, but little the worse for the terrible experience we had gone through, except for Mike's sore head.
"'Faith an' I reckon we're all whot's left,' was his first word as he got to his feet and stretched himself.
"'It looks that way,' I replied sadly.
"Naturally our next thought was about food, for we had not eaten for nearly twenty-four hours, and my throat was parched for lack of water. Inland the ground rose slightly and, perhaps a quarter of a mile away we could see a few trees growing in a clump.
"'If they're cocoanut palms we won't starve to-day,' Mike said as we set off toward them.
"They were cocoanuts, as we had hoped, but there were only a half dozen of them and the nuts were few and far between on them. But we got about twenty, and ate one apiece, drinking the milk. It was not much of a breakfast, but a whole lot better than nothing. Then we cached the rest in a little pile at the foot of one of the trees and went on to the top of the rise, which was only a few hundred feet away. From here we could see the whole island, which wasn't more than a mile long by about half that wide, and it looked to consist of nothing but sand, except that at the end toward the north it looked as though it might be rocky. Not another tree or shrub was visible and I'll never forget the look on Mike's face as he turned to me.
"'Si, I reckon we're in Dutch,' he said.
"Well, it sure did look that way. With no water, or, at least, little prospect of any, and only a matter of twenty cocoanuts between us and starvation the prospect wasn't what you'd call alluring. And there wasn't another island in sight. Nothing but blue water as far as we could see in every direction. Of course we could only guess at the distance we'd been driven in the storm, and we hadn't much idea of the direction, so we didn't know whether we were in the path of ships or not.
"'Well, let's amble over to the end there and see what's what,'" I suggested, and we started off, walking slowly through the sand, for by this time the sun was well up in the sky and it was mighty hot.
"When we got to the end of the island, sure enough it was rocky all right. In fact we stood on a ledge of rock and looked straight down into what looked like deep water twenty feet or more below. But that was all. I had hoped that we would find at least a spring of water hidden among the rocks, but there was none, not a drop, and already our tongues were hanging out of our mouths.