It was a quart of Scotch whisky, corked and sealed as it had left the distillery.  And it had been there for two years!  The more the reader ponders this striking fact, the better will he be able to realise the depth of the solitude in which we now found ourselves.  While the boys slung the beds, and Tom busied himself with dinner, we sat and smoked, and savoured together our satisfaction in our complete and grandiose isolation.

“It might well be weeks before any one could find us!” said my friend, eager as a boy lapping up horrors from his favourite author.  “Yes, weeks!” And then he added:  “It was creeks like this the old pirates used to hide in.”

And so we talked of pirates and buried treasure, while the sun set like a flight of flamingoes over a scene that was indeed like a picture torn from a Boy’s Own Book of Adventure.

Then Tom brought us our dinner, and the dark began to settle down upon us, thrillingly lonely, and full of strange, desolate cries of night creatures from the mangrove swamps that surrounded our little oasis for miles.  Not even when Tom and I had been alone on “Dead Men’s Shoes” had I felt so utterly out of and beyond the world.

Charlie smacked his big smiling lips at the savage solitude of it.

“It’s great to get away from everything—­like this—­isn’t it?” he remarked, looking round with huge satisfaction into the homeless haunted wild, with its brooding blackness as of primeval chaos.

Sailor lay at our feet, dreaming of to-morrow’s duck.  His master’s thoughts were evidently in the same direction.

“How are you with a gun?” he asked, turning to the boy.

“O!  I won’t brag.  I had better wait till to-morrow.  But, of course, you will have to lend me a gun.”

“I have a beauty for you—­just your weight,” replied Charlie, his face beaming as it did only at the thought of his guns, which he kept polished like jewels and guarded as jealously as a violinist his violin, or an Arab his harem.

CHAPTER VI

Duck.

Dawn was just breaking as I felt Charlie’s great paw on my shoulder next morning.  He was very serious.  For a moment, as I sat up, still half asleep, I thought he had news of Tobias.  But it was only duck.  He had heard a great quacking during the night, and was impatient to make a start.  So was Sailor.

I was scarcely dressed when Tom arrived with breakfast, and in a few minutes we had shouldered our guns, and were crossing the half mile of peaty waste that divided us from the marl lakes from which the night wind had carried that provocative quacking.  Ahead of us, the crew were carrying the skiffs on their shoulders, and very soon we were each seated in regulation fashion on a canvas chair in front of our respective skiffs, with our guns across our knees, and a negro behind us to do the poling.