Then it occurred to me that it was round here that my father always managed to baffle my search whenever he hid from me. I had tracked his lair to within a hundred yards or so, but never to its exact goal. However, I thought this was no time for further investigation. The air was tense with alarm for me, and I felt a pang of doubt on my father's account. If Dirk should catch him following ... I thought he would either break his back like a stick, or put that famous knife trick of his into practice. But I was used to strangeness and mystery, and the idea of hunting and being hunted was familiar to me from as far back as I could remember; so I easily shook off the impression of alarm that had crept over me, and skirting away from the point of danger I was soon stripping for a dive in the pool. The afternoon was beautiful, with a blazing sun, and I was in and out of the water, practising all my strokes and tricks, for some hours, for evening was drawing on before I dried myself for the last time by jumping up and down in the sun, and pulled on my clothes. The tide had been coming in, and was now almost full. With one last look at the tempting depths, wondering whether I should strip again for a final plunge, I turned and set off up the cliff. Some day, I vowed, I would negotiate that huge frowning brow of rock that overhung the pool, for at present if I wanted to reach the level platform above it--an ideal spot for a boy to sprawl on and send his dreams out over the sea--I had to scramble down from the top of the cliff; and in climbing up from below I had to be content with a longer trail to the left. I had taken only a few steps when I heard a gruff voice beneath me chanting an old sea-song, and with instinctive caution I ducked behind a boulder as I saw the nose of a boat pushing out from Ebb-Tide Cave. I rubbed my eyes twice to clear my sight, when I saw that in the boat was none other than Dirk himself. But there was no mistaking him. And he knew his way too, for he steered straight for the outlet of the pool, and I watched him pass easily through the choppy waves, guiding himself with his oars, and out through the twisting channel, where rounding a headland of rock he disappeared. I now knew that my suspicion of those closed gates in the cave was justly founded, yet until this moment I didn't realize how little I had credited my own childish theories, for the revelation came to me not as a thing long expected, but with a shock of surprise.