All this, I say, was done when the moon showed us the island like a great barren rock rising up sheer from the sea. And when it was done, Mister Jacob called my attention to something which in the hurry of shore-going I might never have seen at all or thought about. It was nothing less than this--that their fool's beacon was out to-night, and all the sea about it as black as ink. Whoever set up the light, then, did not use it for a seaman's benefit, but for his own whim. I reckoned up the situation at a glance, and even at that early stage I began to know the terrible meaning of it. "Mister Jacob," said I, "those that keep that beacon are either fools or knaves." "Or both, sir," said he. "Which one is the own brother to the other. Aye, captain, 'tis lucky ye've the parish lantern, as my poor father used to say when----" But Peter Bligh never finished it that night. The words were still in his mouth when a rocket shot up over the sea and bursting in a cloud of gold-blue sparks, cast a weird, cold light upon rock and reef and all that troubled sea. And as the rocket fell our big carpenter, Seth Barker, standing aft by the hatch, cries out, "Ship ashore! Ship ashore, by----!" CHAPTER V STRANGE SIGHTS ASHORE, AND WHAT WE SAW OF THEM Now, when Seth Barker cried out that a ship was ashore on the dangerous reefs to the northward of the main island, it is not necessary to tell you what we, a crew of British seamen, were called upon to do. The words were scarcely spoken before I had given the order, "Stand by the boats," and sent every man to his station. Excited the hands were, that I will not deny; excited and willing enough to tell you about it if you'd asked them; but no man among them opened his lips, and while they stood there, anxious and ready, I had my glass to my eye and tried to make out the steamer and what had befallen her. Nor was Mister Jacob behind me, but he and Peter Bligh at my side, we soon knew the truth and made up our minds about it. "There's a ship on the reef, sure enough, and by the cut of her she's the Santa Cruz we spoke this afternoon," said Mr. Jacob, and added, "a dangerous shore, sir, a dangerous shore." "But full of kind-hearted people that fire their guns at poor shipwrecked mariners," put in Peter Bligh. I wouldn't believe him at first, but there was no denying it, awful truth that it was, when a few minutes had passed. "Good God," cried I, "it can't be so, Peter, and yet that's a rifle's tongue, or I've lost my hearing." Well, we all stood together and listened as men listen for some poor creature's death-cry, or the sounds which come in the stillness of the night to affright and unnerve us. Sure enough, you couldn't have counted ten before the report of guns was heard distinctly above the distant roar of breakers; while flashes of crimson light, playing about the reef, seemed to tell the whole story without another word from me.