run of theirs, fifteen or twenty of them I should think, up
the beach.

"Increase and multiply, my friends," said Montgomery.
"Replenish the island. Hitherto we've had a certain lack of meat here."

As I watched them disappearing, the white-haired man returned with a
brandy-flask and some biscuits. "Something to go on with, Prendick,"
said he, in a far more familiar tone than before. I made no ado,
but set to work on the biscuits at once, while the white-haired man
helped Montgomery to release about a score more of the rabbits.
Three big hutches, however, went up to the house with the puma.
The brandy I did not touch, for I have been an abstainer from
my birth.




VII. THE LOCKED DOOR.


THE reader will perhaps understand that at first everything was so strange
about me, and my position was the outcome of such unexpected adventures,
that I had no discernment of the relative strangeness of this
or that thing. I followed the llama up the beach, and was overtaken
by Montgomery, who asked me not to enter the stone enclosure.
I noticed then that the puma in its cage and the pile of packages
had been placed outside the entrance to this quadrangle.

I turned and saw that the launch had now been unloaded, run out again,