In ink!  My fingers trembled and involuntarily tore a small rent in the pulpy mass.  I laid it on the grass to dry in the full sunshine, seated myself beside it, and looked around me with a shiver.

A paper boat—­the paper written on—­and the writing in ink!  I could be sworn that neither Captain Branscome nor Mr. Rogers carried an inkbottle.  The paper, too, was of a kind unfamiliar to me; thin, foreign paper, ruled with faint lines in watermark.  Certainly no one on board the Espriella owned such writing-paper or the like of it.  But again, the paper could not have been long in the water, and the writing seemed to be fresh.  As the torn edges crinkled in the heat and curled themselves half-open, I peered between them and distinguished a capital “R,” followed by an “i”; but these letters ran into a long smear, impossible to decipher.

I had flung myself prone on the grass, and so lay, with chin propped on both palms, staring at the thing as if it had been some strange beetle—­staring till my eyes ached.  But now I took it in my fingers again and prised the edges a little wider.  Below the smear came a blank space, and below this were five lines ruled in ink with a number of dotted marks between them. . . .  A smudged stave of music?  Yes, certainly it was music.  I could distinguish the mark of the treble clef.  Lastly, at the foot of the page, as I unwrapped it at length, came a blurred illegible signature.

But what mattered the sense of it?  The writing was here, and recent.  No one on board the Espriella could have penned it.  The island, then, was inhabited—­now, at this moment inhabited, and the inhabitants, whoever they might be, at this moment not far from me.

I crushed the paper into my pocket, and stood up, slowly looking about me.  For a second or two panic had me by the hair.  I turned to run, but the dense woods through which I had ascended so light-heartedly had suddenly become a jungle of God knows what terrors.  I remembered that from the first cascade upward I had scarcely once had a view of more than a dozen yards ahead, so thickly the bushes closed in upon me.  I saw myself retracing my steps through those bushes, in every one of which now lurked a pair of watching eyes.  I glanced up at the cliff across the stream.  For aught I knew, eyes were watching me from its summit.

Needless to say, I cursed the hour of my transgression, the fatal impulse that had prompted me to break ship.  I knew myself for a fool; but how might I win back to repentance?  As repent I certainly would and acknowledge my fault.  Could I keep hold on my nerve to thread my way back and over those five separate and accursed waterfalls?  If only I were given a clear space to run!