She stood on tiptoe and looked for the flash of the killing knife or the dull crash of the stone with which commonly the wreckers insured silence and safety when any came alive ashore along with wreckage of price from the great waters. The heads of the men were all bent inward, but Bess Landsborough saw no threatening movement of their arms nor yet any signs of a struggle. She would have drawn Kate away from the scene, but the girl by her side suddenly wrenched herself free, and, plucking up her skirts in her hands, ran hot-foot for the northern shore. CHAPTER XXVIII JOHN SCARLETT COMES ASHORE Kate's sojourn on the island had given her back all her girlish spring of carriage and swift grace of movement. Fleet and light as a goat she sped over the short turf and threaded the sharp shark's fins of the black basaltic ridges, her eyes fixed upon the shifting groups on the shore. Was her love lying there dead before her, or at least in utmost danger of his life? The men stood so close together, all looking inward and downward, that Kate was among them before any one saw her come. She cleft a way through the shouldering press, and there on the wet pebbles of the beach, dragged just a few yards from the shore on which a back-draught from the smooth glides and rattling currents of the tide-race of Suliscanna had cast him, lay the body of John Scarlett. Kate gave a sharp cry, half of disappointment and half of relief. Her love it was not; but his friend it was. And if this were John Scarlett, where would Wat Gordon be by this time--of a surety lying deep in the green heave of some far-reaching "gloop," or battered against the cruel cliffs of the "goës," into which the surges swelled and thundered, throwing themselves in bootless assault upon the perpendicular cliffs, and fretting their pure green arches into delicatest gray lace of foam and little white cataracts which came pouring back into the gloomy depths along every crevice and over every ledge. John Scarlett lay with his broad chest naked and uncovered, for his coat and waistcoat had already become centres of two separate quarrels, shrill and contentious as the bickerings of sparrows over the worm which they hold by either end and threaten to rend in pieces. Patterns of muskets and sword-blades were wrought upon the veteran's breast in a fashion which was then common to all men of adventuring--land travellers and seafarers alike. The old soldier's arms and breast were a mass of scars and cicatrices, both from his many public campaigns and from his innumerable excursions upon the field of private honor. "This has been a man indeed," said one of the men that stood by; "many a knife has been tried on that skin, and many, I warrant, gat deeper holes and deadlier cuts than these in the making of this pretty patchwork."