We crept out from the cave and made off up the shore as fast as possible.  Jerry went ahead and jumped up on a rock to reconnoiter.  He did look quite piratical, with my black sailor tie bound tight over his head and two buttons of his shirt undone.  Greg had his own necktie wrapped around his head, but several locks of hair had escaped from under it.  He always manages to have something not quite right about his costumes.  He has very nice hair—­curly, and quite amberish colored—­but it’s not at all like a pirate’s.  I poked him from behind to make him hurry, for Jerry was pointing at a big schooner that was coming down the harbor.  We all lay down flat behind the rock until she had gone slowly around the point.  We could see the sun winking on something that might have been a cannon in her waist—­that’s the place where cannon always are—­and of course the captain must have been keeping a sharp lookout landward with his spy-glass.

“Eh, mon,” said Jerry, when the schooner had passed, “but yon was a verra close thing!”

That’s one of the worst things about Jerry,—­the way he mixes up language.  We’d been reading “Kidnapped,” and I suppose he forgot he wasn’t Alan.

“Silence, dog!” I said, to remind him of who we were.  “Very like she’s but hove to in the offing, and for aught you know she’s maybe sending ashore the jolly-boat by now.”

“Then let’s go to the end of the point and have a look,” Greg suggested.

He doesn’t often make speeches, because Jerry is apt to pounce on him and tell him he’s “too plain American,” but I think it isn’t fair, because he hasn’t read as many books as Jerry and I. So I hurried up and said: 

“Bravely spoke, my lad; so we will, my hearty!” And we crawled and clambered along till we came to the end of the point where it’s all stones and seaweed and big surf sometimes.  The surf was not very high this time,—­just waves that went whoosh and then pulled the pebbles back with a nice scrawpy sound.  The schooner was half-way down to the Headland, not paying any attention to us.

“Ah ha!” Jerry said, “safe once more from an ignominious death.  But, Chris, look at the Sea Monster!  What’s happened to it?”

The Sea Monster is a bare black rock-island off the end of Wecanicut.  We called it that because it looks like one, and it hasn’t any other name that we know of.  We’d always wanted awfully to go out there and explore it, but the only time we ever asked old Captain Moss, who has boats for hire, he said, “Thunderin’ bad landin’.  Nothin’ to see there but a clutter o’ gulls’ nests,” and went on painting the Jolly Nancy, which is his nicest boat.

But the thing that Jerry was pointing out now was very queer indeed.  It was just a little too far away to see clearly what had happened, but it seemed as if a piece of rock had fallen away on the side toward us, leaving a jaggedy opening as black as a hat and high enough for a person to stand upright in.