"Better'n nothin'," observed Jasper philosophically "S'pose we du search round-like. Might find somethin' worth our while."
It was a strain of his wrecker ancestors that prompted this remark, but the suggestion was worth acting upon. With the wind on shore and a heavy sea tumbling in there might be valuable spoil from the ocean.
The search resulted in the discovery of the mizzen mast with the sail still set. The mast had been broken off close to the thwart-clamp. A little farther on they discovered an oar, a length of grass rope, and another copper air-tank, all of which they collected and placed well above high-water mark.
"We'll get along, now," declared Burgoyne. "I came to look for coco-nuts, not wreckage, although I admit the search has not been exactly fruitless."
"One minute, sir," interrupted Minalto. "What be that? We ne'er had no li'l barrel in the boat, did us?"
He pointed to a small cask, half buried in the sand It was encrusted with barnacles, and growing marine whiskers a foot or more in length.
"Heavy 'un be, too," continued Jasper, searching round for a stone to knock out the tightly fixed bung.
"Later on will do for that," declared the Third Officer. "Roll it up under that bush."
Reluctantly Minalto turned away from his find, like a dog ordered by his master to drop a succulent bone. In his present appearance—hatless, with a lavish growth of beard, bare almost to the waist, having lost most of his shirt in the struggle with the waves—he looked more like a seventeenth-century wrecker of the inhospitable Scillies than a steady-going quartermaster of the Mercantile Marine.
Burgoyne's appearance was very little better. He, too, was sporting a bristling beard. He was capless—a fact to which the now powerful rays of the sun was calling pressing attention. His one-time white patrol-jacket was torn, dirty, and had half of one sleeve missing. His trousers ended at the knees, while his shoes, cut by contact with the sharp coral, were little more than a pair of ragged canvas uppers, held together by fragments of once good British leather. Slight gashes on his forehead and cheek, and his bandaged hand, completed his dishevelled and disreputable appearance.