The cliffs on the north shore of the cove were considerably higher than on the other side.  The wreck lay close in, driven high upon the narrow shelf of rocks and sand at the base of the sheer ascent.  Sand had heaped up around her hull and flung itself across her deck like a white winding-sheet.  Surprisingly, the vessel was a very small one, a little sloop, indeed, much like the fragile pleasure-boats that cluster under the Sausalito shore at home.  The single mast had been broken off short, and the stump of the bowsprit was visible, like a finger beckoning for rescue from the crawling sand.  She was embedded most deeply at the stem, and forward of the sand-heaped cockpit the roof of the small cabin was still clear.

“Poor forlorn little boat!” I said.  “What in the world do you suppose brought such a mite of a thing to this unheard-of spot?”

“Perhaps she belonged to the copra chap.  One man could handle her.”

“What would he want with her?  A small boat like this is better for fishing and rowing about the cove.”

“Perhaps she brought him here from Panama, though he couldn’t have counted on taking back a very bulky cargo.”

“Then why leave her strewn about on the rocks?  And besides”—­here the puzzle of Crusoe recurred to me and seemed to link itself with this—­“then how did he get away himself?”

But my oarsman was much more at home on the solid ground of fact than on the uncharted waters of the hypothetical.

“Don’t know, I’m sure,” he returned uninterestedly.  Evidently the hermit had got away, so why concern one’s self about the method?  I am sure the Light Brigade must have been made up of Cuthbert Vanes.  “Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die—­”

We rowed in close under the port bow of the sloop, and on the rail I made out a string of faded letters.  I began excitedly to spell them out.

“I—­s—­l—­oh, Island Queen!  You see she did belong here.  Probably she brought the original porcine Adam and Eve to the island.”

“Luckily forgot the snake, though!” remarked the Honorable Bertie with unlooked-for vivacity.  For so far Aunt Jane’s trembling anticipations had been unfulfilled by the sight of a single snake, a fact laid by me to the credit of St. Patrick and by Cookie to that of the pigs.

“Snakes ‘d jes’ be oysters on de half shell to dem pigs,” declared Cookie.

As we rowed away from the melancholy little derelict I saw that near by a narrow gully gave access to the top of the cliff, and I resolved that I would avail myself of this path to visit the Island Queen again.  My mind continued to dwell upon the unknown figure of the copra gatherer.  Perhaps the loss of his sloop had condemned him to weary months or years of solitude upon the island, before the rare glimmer of a sail or the trail of a steamer’s smoke upon the horizon gladdened his longing eyes.  Hadn’t he grown very tired of pork, and didn’t his soul to this day revolt at a ham sandwich?  What would he say if he ever discovered that he might have brought away a harvest of gold instead of copra from the island?  Last but not least, did not his heart and conscience, if he by chance possessed them, ache horribly at the thought of the forsaken Crusoe?