The two speakers were Michali and the Lieutenant. They were standing, together with the American, beside a fire of driftwood which the vestas in Curtis' metal matchbox had enabled them to light. A bit of sand, sheltered from the waves by a projecting rock, had made it easy for them to land. It is true that Michali's strength had soon given out, but his friends, both being powerful swimmers, had brought him to the shore in safety. After scrambling for a way blindly up the side of a hill, actuated by an instinctive, though perhaps groundless, fear of capture, they had paused and looked down upon the sea. There were two of the sailors hanging to the arm of a gallows frame planted in the sea. The torn canvas fluttered helpless in the wind. The captain clung to the arm of another gallows a few feet distant, and the third sailor was floating about over the submerged caique on the cabin roof. The gunboat shied out into deeper water, and brought the filibusters in. Then the three comrades crouched behind a rock, while the Cyclopean eye of the monster that hurls deadlier missiles than old Homer ever dreamed of searched hill and shore. "They'll never try to catch us," said Lindbohm, as the gunboat sailed away. "They couldn't if they wanted to, and they've no particular business with us anyhow." So they built a fire and kept themselves warm as much by the exercise of bringing and breaking up wood as by the flames themselves. When morning finally peeped at the pallid sea and kissed its face to ruddy life and laughter, the Cretan, the Swede and the American looked one another over and took an inventory of their condition. They were dry, but hungry. Curtis and Michali had lost their hats. Michali had tied a handkerchief about his own head in peasant fashion, and had performed the same office for Curtis. Lindbohm's straw had not escaped from the tether, and he still wore it, glistening with salt and hanging down on one side like the wing of a wounded duck. His long coat had shrunk until the tails parted in the middle of his back as though the space between them had been cut out with a triangular stamp. He alone of the three had removed his shoes after reaching the shore. Not being able to put them on again, he cut away the uppers, and tied the remnant on with strings, which he passed through the holes slashed in the sides. A resourceful and courageous man was the Lieutenant. "Now, we are ready," he said, to Michali; "lead on to breakfast." "I think," replied Michali, "that we must to the sea go down, and pass around the shore to where the caique wished to come up. There we shall find Greeks waiting. _Embros!_" (forward.) But, alas, when they arrived at the beach again they found that the little stretch of sand which had been their salvation ended against an abrupt wall of rock. "We must go around the hill the other way," said Curtis.