We all pricked up our ears at this curious saying, and Dolly Venn, he whipped out a question before I could--indeed, he spoke the French tongue very prettily; and for about five minutes the two of them went at it hammer and tongs like two old women at charring. "What does he mean by sleep-time, lad?" I asked in between their argument. "Why shouldn't a man sleep on Ken's Island? What nonsense will he talk next?" I'd forgotten that the old man spoke English too, but he turned upon me quickly to remind me of the fact. "No nonsense, monsieur, as many a one has found--no nonsense at all, but very dreadful thing. Three, four time by the year it come; three, four time it go. All men sleep if they not go away--you sleep if you not go away. Ah, the good God send you to the ship before that day." He did his best to put it clearly, but he might as well have talked Chinese. Dolly, who understood his lingo, made a brave attempt, but did not get much farther. "He says that this island is called by the Japanese the Island of Sleep. Two or three times every year there comes up from the marshes a poisonous fog which sends you into a trance from which you don't recover, sometimes for months. It can't be true, sir, and yet that's what he says." "True or untrue, Dolly," said I, in a low voice, "we'll not give it the chance. It's a fairy tale, of course, though it doesn't sound very pretty when you hear it." "Nor is that music any more to my liking," exclaimed Peter Bligh, at this point, meaning that we should listen to a couple of gunshots fired, not in the woods far down below us, but somewhere, as it seemed, on the sea-beach we had failed to make. "That would be Harry Doe warning us," cried I. "And meaning that it was dangerous for us to go down." "He'll have put off and saved the longboat, anyway. We'll hail him at dawn, and see where the ship is." They heard me in silence. The tempest roaring in the peaks above that weird, wild place; our knowledge of the men on the island below; the old Frenchman's strange talk--no wonder that our eyes were wide open and sleep far from them. Dawn, indeed, we waited for as those who are passing through the terrible night. I think sometimes that, if we had known what was in store for us, we should have prayed to God that we might not see the day. CHAPTER IX WE LOOK OUT FOR THE SOUTHERN CROSS