The other man had been in the fore part of the canoe, closely scrutinising the land.  He had a sheet of yellow paper on his knee.

“Come and look at this, Evans,” he said.

Both men spoke in low tones, and their lips were hard and dry.

The man called Evans came swaying along the canoe until he could look over his companion’s shoulder.

The paper had the appearance of a rough map.  By much folding it was creased and worn to the pitch of separation, and the second man held the discoloured fragments together where they had parted.  On it one could dimly make out, in almost obliterated pencil, the outline of the bay.

“Here,” said Evans, “is the reef, and here is the gap.”  He ran his thumb-nail over the chart.

“This curved and twisting line is the river—­I could do with a drink now!—­and this star is the place.”

“You see this dotted line,” said the man with the map; “it is a straight line, and runs from the opening of the reef to a clump of palm-trees.  The star comes just where it cuts the river.  We must mark the place as we go into the lagoon.”

“It’s queer,” said Evans, after a pause, “what these little marks down here are for.  It looks like the plan of a house or something; but what all these little dashes, pointing this way and that, may mean I can’t get a notion.  And what’s the writing?”

“Chinese,” said the man with the map.

“Of course! He was a Chinee,” said Evans.

“They all were,” said the man with the map.

They both sat for some minutes staring at the land, while the canoe drifted slowly.  Then Evans looked towards the paddle.

“Your turn with the paddle now, Hooker,” said he.

And his companion quietly folded up his map, put it in his pocket, passed Evans carefully, and began to paddle.  His movements were languid, like those of a man whose strength was nearly exhausted.

Evans sat with his eyes half closed, watching the frothy breakwater of the coral creep nearer and nearer.  The sky was like a furnace, for the sun was near the zenith.  Though they were so near the Treasure he did not feel the exaltation he had anticipated.  The intense excitement of the struggle for the plan, and the long night voyage from the mainland in the unprovisioned canoe had, to use his own expression, “taken it out of him.”  He tried to arouse himself by directing his mind to the ingots the Chinamen had spoken of, but it would not rest there; it came back headlong to the thought of sweet water rippling in the river, and to the almost unendurable dryness of his lips and throat.  The rhythmic wash of the sea upon the reef was becoming audible now, and it had a pleasant sound in his ears; the water washed along the side of the canoe, and the paddle dripped between each stroke.  Presently he began to doze.