“Clean beat,” he muttered.  “By day we’ll pass ’em.  Damn ’em—­and I’ll see ’em dyin’ in the sun—­lilies like dried, dead weeds on the sand—­that’s what they’ll be in a couple o’ days—­he said they was pretty, that fello’ back there—­” Lying with his head on his arm, he lifted a thumb to point over his shoulder.  He couldn’t see the distant blotch of fire against the low stars—­he didn’t want to.  He couldn’t mark the silent drift of the sea gardens in the pass, but he gloated in the thought that they were riding to their death.  The pitiless sun, the salt tides drunk up to their spongy bulbs, and their glory passed—­they would be matted refuse on the shores and a man could trample them.  Yes, the sea was with Tedge, and the rivers, too; the flood waters were lifting the lilies from their immemorable strongholds and forcing them out to their last pageant of death.

The three castaways slept in the warm sand.  It was an hour later that some other living thing stirred at the far end of Au Fer reef.  A scorched and weakened steer came on through salt pools to stagger and fall.  Presently another, and then a slow line of them.  They crossed the higher ridge to huddle about a sink that might have made them remember the dry drinking holes of their arid home plains.  Tired, gaunt cattle mooing lonesomely, when the man came about them to dig with his bloody fingers in the sand.

He tried another place, and another—­he didn’t know—­he was a man of the short-grass country, not a coaster; perhaps a sandy sink might mean fresh water.  But after each effort the damp feeling on his hands was from his gashed and battered head and not life-giving water.  He wiped the blood from his eyes and stood up in the starlight.

“Twenty-one of ’em—­alive—­and me,” he muttered.  “I got ’em off—­they trampled me and beat me down, but I got their pens open.  Twenty-one livin’—­and me on the sands!”

He wondered stupidly how he had done it.  The stern of the Marie Louise had burned off and sogged down in deep water, but her bow hung to the reef, and in smoke and flame he had fought the cattle over it.  They clustered now in the false water-hole, silent, listless, as if they knew the uselessness of the urge of life on Au Fer reef.

And after a while the man went on eastward.  Where and how far the sand ridge stretched he did not know.  Vaguely he knew of the tides and sun to-morrow.  From the highest point he looked back.  The wreck was a dull red glow, the stars above it cleared now of smoke.  The sea, too, seemed to have gone back to its infinite peace, as if it had washed itself daintily after this greasy morsel it must hide in its depths.

A half hour the man walked wearily, and then before him stretched water again.  He turned up past the tide flowing down the pass—­perhaps that was all of Au Fer.  A narrow spit of white sand at high tide, and even over that, the sea breeze freshening, the surf would curl?