The chasing clouds gathered, until the sky was almost completely overcast. The moon would not rise till late; it became dark rapidly. But as the gloom of night thickened on land and sea, a little golden flame shot up on the shore, and grew large and bright as the surrounding shadows became more dense. It was the flame of the boys' camp-fire, which they kindled on the seaward side of the dunes, and fed with rubbish from the high-water mark of the recent storm. Later tides had not then reached it, and plenty of it was dry enough to burn. [Illustration: PERCE AND THE TWINS ON THEIR WAY TO THE BEACH.] Chips and old shingles, bleached sea-weed, broken planks, strips and slabs from saw-mills on some far-away river, and other refuse, littered the strand,--here, a broken lobster-pot which the rolling waves had washed ashore, and there, a ship's fender, worn smooth, with a fragment of rope still held in the auger-hole by its knotted end. Such of this fuel as best suited their immediate purpose the boys gathered for their fire; and Olly, in his wave-tossed boat, could see their agile figures running to and fro in the light of the flames. "There'll be heaps of flood-wood, as well as kelp, for us to gather to-morrow," said Perce. "Don't put any more on the fire, boys." "Why not?" asked the twins. "There's no use wasting it," answered Perce, adding, "We've fire enough. We'll roast our corn and go to bed, so as to be up early. It'll be high tide before five to-morrow." "Then wake Nicodemus!" cried Moke in a gleeful tone. And again the three boys raised the wild chorus of the old plantation song. "Olly ought to be here!" said Perce. "He must have gone home by the coast; and that's the way we missed him." Even then, but for the noise of the surf and the whistling of the wind, they might have heard Olly's last screams; and by straining their eyes they might have seen far out on the gloomy deep a dim object, now rising for a moment against the line of the evening sky, and now disappearing in a hollow of the waves. With hay about their heads to shelter them from the wind, and the light of their camp-fire gleaming over them, the kelp-gatherers lay under their blankets, in the hollow of the dunes. They talked or sang until the flames died to a feeble glimmer, that served to bring out by contrast the surrounding gloom of sea and land and sky. "Isn't it dark, though!" exclaimed Perce. "I had no idea it would cloud so. I believe it is going to rain. Then shan't we be in a fix?" "It can't rain," said Moke. "No fear of that," added Poke, in a muffled voice from under his blanket. "What's the reason?" Perce demanded. "Uncle Moses said so," replied both the twins together.