to call the cave, and set up housekeeping in a manner that no hurricane, however severe, could interfere with.
“Nobody can say I am in the way here,” he said—for he had gotten into the habit of talking to himself—surveying, as he spoke, his rocky home, and smiling sadly. “I am neither a bother nor a burden to any one now. I’m alone on an uninhabited island, and may die here, for all I can tell to the contrary; but I don’t know but what that is better than being nagged by Aunt Susan, or driven about on the ocean, with nothing but an old schooner between one and the bottom of the Caribbean Sea. It’s just eighteen days since I landed on this island, and I was five days on the schooner—that makes twenty-three—and I’m alive yet. If I have to stay here a year, that will not be very long. I’ve provision enough to last that length of time, and it will give me an opportunity to grow and to think. I’ll read all Captain Thorne’s books, and there’s a good many of them, including works on navigation, history and science. I’ll fish and row when the weather is fine, and when it isn’t I’ll amuse myself in enlarging the grotto. I’ll make a collection of all the plants and flowers I find on the land and all the shells and seaweeds I find in the sea, or that may drift on the shore. I’ve a whole island that I may honestly call my own, a box of candles, plenty of matches, four cans of oil, a lamp and a lantern, a good boat, and lots of other things besides; so I am pretty well off, after all, and ought not to grumble at the hard luck which has befallen me.”
And Frank did try hard not to grumble; but, with the sea beating eternally around his rocky home, and no change anywhere, day after day, save in the scudding clouds and the waning of the old and the rising of the new moon, he grew very weary of his utter loneliness, and there came a time when he would have given his life to hear again a human voice and see again a human face.
CHAPTER XIV.
DANGEROUS VISITORS.
Every hour in the day Frank scanned the horizon in hopes of seeing a sail. He felt that he could not be more than a hundred miles from the Bay Islands, and not altogether out of the track of sailing vessels.
Once he saw what appeared to be a long, low cloud hovering midway between the sky and water, and which he knew to be the smoke from a steamer; but it was so far off that, even with the glass, he could only make out the slow-moving line of smoke that marked her course.
His boat he kept in the channel forming the water entrance to the grotto, and during the roughest weather he had yet experienced on the island the tide never once rose higher than from four to six inches, and its ebb and flow was so silent that it was never heard, no matter how loud and tempestuously the surf was roaring without.
The rainfalls, though light, were more frequent, denoting the near approach of the dreaded wet season, when for days together he might be kept a prisoner in the cave, so he wisely took advantage of what remained to him of fair weather, and was out on the reef every morning as soon as it was light, looking, with longing eyes, for the hoped-for sail.
What wonder, then, after all this patient watching and waiting, that his heart leaped with indescribable joy when he saw a sail, not three miles away, and heading directly for the island!