was whittling the point of a stick into a long wooden peg, and when,
by-and-by, he had finished what he was about, he arose and stepped to
where he who seemed to be the captain had stuck his cane upright into
the ground as though to mark some particular spot. He drew the cane out
of the sand, thrusting the stick down in its stead. Then he drove the
long peg down with a wooden mallet which the negro handed to him. The
sharp rapping of the mallet upon the top of the peg sounded loud in the
perfect stillness, and Tom lay watching and wondering what it all
meant.

The man, with quick-repeated blows, drove the peg farther and farther
down into the sand until it showed only two or three inches above the
surface. As he finished his work there was another faint flash of
light, and by-and-by another smothered rumble of thunder, and Tom as he
looked out towards the westward, saw the silver rim of the round and
sharply outlined thundercloud rising slowly up into the sky and pushing
the other and broken drifting clouds before it.

The two white men were now stooping over the peg, the negro man
watching them. Then presently the man with the cane started straight
away from the peg, carrying the end of a measuring-line with him, the
other end of which the man with the plaited queue held against the top
of the peg. When the pirate captain had reached the end of the
measuring-line he marked a cross upon the sand, and then again they
measured out another stretch of space.

So they measured a distance five times over, and then, from where Tom
lay, he could see the man with the queue drive another peg just at the
foot of a sloping rise of sand that swept up beyond into a tall white
dune marked sharp and clear against the night sky behind. As soon as