It was just before sundown that we learned the fate of the dwarf and his comrades. A great wave rising between us and the broad red disc of the sun as he set amid a streak of hazy vapour, we observed a black object tossing on the very crest of the sea. We trimmed the schooner’s course for this dim speck, and after losing and regaining sight of it many times, at length made out that it was a boat or canoe, waterlogged and abandoned. The sun was now beneath the horizon—the speeding twilight of the tropics was waning fast away. The stars were already glimmering, and the leaden-coloured sea, with its great dusky opaque waves, rolled blackly and hoarsely around us; when the schooner, plunging into a trough, swept within a couple of fathoms of the wreck. It was that of a large piragua, bottom upwards, part of her bows torn away, where she had crashed down upon a reef. As we went plunging by, a surge from our bows splashed over the piragua, and, rolling her round, as she wallowed log-like in the water, we all recognised the drowned corpse of Paul Bedloe lashed to the stump of the mast, his nerveless legs and arms jerking about with the wash of the water, his blue eyes open and staring, like the eyes of a fish, and his light hair now floating out when the sea rose above him, and anon, when it subsided, settling down and clinging round his white dead face. With the next heave of the sea the canoe turned over as it lay when we first saw it, and then drifted away down into the gathering darkness of the night. CHAPTER XVII. OF THEIR UNSUCCESSFUL SEARCH FOR THE SUNKEN TREASURE—WEARYING AT LENGTH OF THE UNDERTAKING, THEY PURSUE THEIR COURSE—THE LEGEND OF ‘NELL’S BEACON,’ OR THE ‘CORPUS SANT.’