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 toward 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
the man with the plaited queue had driven the second peg into the ground
they began measuring again, and so, still measuring, disappeared in
another direction which took them in behind the sand dune where Tom no
longer could see what they were doing.

The negro still sat by the chest where the two had left him, and so
bright was the moonlight that from where he lay Tom could see the glint
of it twinkling in the whites of his eyeballs.