But I tell myself with shudders that it was not I, but some extraordinary recrudescence of a primitive self, that indulged these lethal gloatings.

No steps but our own, no voices but of birds, broke the stillness of the woods.  We moved onward swiftly, and presently the noise of the sea came to us with the sudden loudness that I remembered.  I paused, signaled caution to my companions, and crept on.

We passed the grave, and I saw that the vines had been torn aside again, and that the tombstone was gone.  We came to the brink of the cliff, and I pointed silently downward along the ledge to the angle in which lay the mouth of the cave.  My breath came quickly, for at any instant a head might be thrust forth from the opening.  Already the sun was mounting toward the zenith.  The noontide heat and stillness was casting its drowsy spell upon the island.  The air seemed thicker, the breeze more languid.  And all this meant meal-time—­and the thoughts of hungry pirates turning toward camp.

My hope was that they were still preoccupied with the fruitless search in the cave.

Mr. Shaw and Cuthbert dropped down upon the ledge.  Though under whispered orders to retreat I could not, but hung over the edge of the cliff, eager and breathless.  Then with a bound the men were beside me.  Mr. Shaw caught my hand, and we rushed together into the woods.

A quake, a roar, a shower of flying rocks.  It was over—­the dynamite had done its work, whether successfully or not remained to be seen.  After a little the Scotchman ventured back.  He returned to us where we waited in the woods—­Cuthbert to mount guard over me—­with a cleared face.

“It’s all right,” he said.  “The entrance is completely blocked.  I set the charge six feet inside, but the roof is down clear to the mouth.  Poor wretches—­they have all come pouring out upon the sand—­”

All three of us went back to the edge of the cliff.  Seventy feet below, on the narrow strip of sand before the sea-mouth of the cave, we saw the figures of four men, who ran wildly about and sought for a foothold on the sheer face of the cliff.  As we stood watching them, with, on my part, at least, unexpected qualms of pity and a cold interior sensation very unlike triumph, they discovered us.  Then for the first time, I suppose, they understood the nature of their disaster.  We could not hear their cries, but we saw arms stretched out to us, fists frantically shaken, hands lifted in prayer.  We saw Mr. Tubbs flop down upon his unaccustomed knees—­it was all rather horrible.

I drew back, shivering.  “It won’t be for long, of course,” I said uncertainly, “just till the steamer comes—­and we’ll give them lots to eat—­but I suppose they think—­they will soon be just a lot more skeletons—­” And here I was threatened with a moist anticlimax to my late Amazonian mood.

Why should the frequent and natural phenomena of tears produce such panic in the male breast?  At a mere April dewiness about my lashes these two strong men quaked.