As the reader may recall, “Short Shrift Island” lay a few miles to the northwest of Andros Island.  Now Andros is a great haunt of wild duck, not to speak of that more august bird, the flamingo.  Attraction number one for the good Charlie.  Then, though it is some hundred and fifty miles long and some fifty miles broad at its broadest, it has never yet, it is said, been entirely explored.

Its centre is still a mystery.  The natives declare it to be haunted, or at all events inhabited by some strange people no one has yet approached close enough to see.  You can see their houses, they say, from a distance, but as you approach them, they disappear.  Here, therefore, seemed an excellent place for Tobias to take cover in.  Charlie’s duck-shooting preserves, endless marl lakes islanded with mangrove copses, lay on the fringe of this mysterious region.  So Andros was plainly marked out for our destination.

But, when Charlie was ready for the start, the wind, which is of the essence of any such contract in the Bahamas, was contrary.  It had been blowing stormily from the southwest, the direction we were bound for, for several days, and nothing with sails had, for a week, felt like venturing out across the surf-swept bar.  It is but forty miles across the Tongue of Ocean which divides the shores of New Providence and Andros, but you need to pick your weather for that, if you don’t want to join the numerous craft that have vanished in that brief but fateful strip of water.  However, the wind was liable to change any minute now, Charlie said, so he warned me to hold myself in readiness to jump aboard at an hour’s notice.

The summons came at last.  I had been out for dinner, and returned home about ten to find the message:  “Be ready to sail at midnight.”

There was a thrilling suddenness about it that appealed to one’s imagination.  Here I had been expecting a landsman’s bed, with a book and a reading-lamp, surrounded by the friendly security of houses; instead, I was to go faring with the night wind into the mystery of the sea.

It was a night of fitful moonlight, and Nassau, with its white houses and white streets, seemed very hushed and spectral as I made my way down to the wharf, vivid in black and silver.

There is always something mysterious about starting a journey at night, even though it be nothing more out-of-the-way than catching a midnight train out of the city; and the simple business of our embarkation breathed an air of romantic secrecy.  The moon seemed to have her finger on her lip, and we talked in lowered voices as though we were bound on some midnight raid.  The night seemed to be charged with the expectancy of the unknown, and Sailor, who, of course, was to be a fellow-voyager, whined restlessly from the wharf side at the little yawl that awaited us in the whispering, lapping water.