He leaped forward, but in his alarm missed the boat and gave it a shove that sent it into the stream.  Sam fell flat on his face, while Masterson, with an exclamation of dismay, leaped for the boat.  But the swift current had it in its grasp and bore it rapidly away.  Masterson sprang on Sam and began beating him violently as the cause of all the trouble.  It was serious enough for them.  The loss of the boat had marooned them on the island.

The boat drifted past a rocky point further down the island shore.  Had they been there, they would have been able to seize it.  They watched it with alarmed eyes as it sailed down the current.  All at once a dark figure dashed from the trees and made a spring from a high rock, hoping, seemingly, to land in the boat.  Instead, there was the sound of a heavy fall and then a piteous groan.

Whoever it was had jumped for the boat, had missed it and fallen on the rocks.  Not caring whether Masterson and his cronies saw them or not, the boys raced along the beach.  From the groans of the injured person they knew that he was badly, possibly mortally, hurt.

In a few minutes they reached his side.

“It’s the wild man!” cried Jack, as they gazed at a hairy, wild-looking man who lay stretched out, breathing heavily, on the rocks where he had fallen.  His only clothing was a pair of tattered canvas trousers and a ragged shirt.

“Poor old Foxy.  He’s done for at last, is Foxy, for his sins,” groaned the man in an insane voice.  “He suffered terrible for his crimes, has Foxy, but it’s all over now.”

“Foxy!” exclaimed Jack.  “That’s the man that came down the river with Blue Nose Sanchez.  The man who stayed in the boat.”

“He must have landed here and then gone crazy from privation,” said Jack.  “I can’t find that any bones are broken,” he said after a brief examination.  “Suppose we carry him back to camp?”

“I wonder where that Masterson outfit has got to?” said Tom, as they picked up the wasted form of Foxy, who was raving and moaning by turns.

“I don’t know.  They are in a fine predicament now.  They’ve got no food and no boat They’re marooned on this island.”

“I suppose we’ll have to help them out,” said Tom.

“I guess so, though they don’t deserve it.”

“I lost that boat,” moaned Foxy.  “I could have got away in it.  Poor old Foxy.  It’s tough on Foxy,” and he began to weep.

The professor found that the man had not suffered any broken bones but the fall had bruised and sprained him and he was helpless.  From scattered bits of his ravings they learned what he had endured on the island and how, when the black sand began to burn him, he had had to give up working on it.  Then his boat had drifted away and since then he had lived the life of a wild man, setting snares for rabbits and partridges, and eating them raw, tearing them with his clawlike fingers.

Early the next day the expected happened.  Chastened, and with burned and swollen hands and feet, Masterson and his cronies came into the boys’ camp at breakfast time.  They looked crestfallen and sheepish, but the boys did not want to make them feel any worse than they did, so they spared them questions at first.