“The can-opener!” he shrieked, “just Heaven, the can-opener.”  He fell prostrate.

Meantime, with trembling hands, I opened the box of bottles.  It contained lager beer bottles, each with a patent tin top.  One by one I took them out.  There were fifty-two in all.  As I withdrew the last one and saw the empty box before me, I shroke out—­“The thing! the thing! oh, merciful Heaven!  The thing you open them with!”

I fell prostrate upon the Captain.

We awoke to find ourselves still a mere speck upon the ocean. 
We felt even smaller than before.

Over us was the burnished copper sky of the tropics.  The heavy, leaden sea lapped the sides of the raft.  All about us was a litter of corn beef cans and lager beer bottles.  Our sufferings in the ensuing days were indescribable.  We beat and thumped at the cans with our fists.  Even at the risk of spoiling the tins for ever we hammered them fiercely against the raft.  We stamped on them, bit at them and swore at them.  We pulled and clawed at the bottles with our hands, and chipped and knocked them against the cans, regardless even of breaking the glass and ruining the bottles.

It was futile.

Then day after day we sat in moody silence, gnawed with hunger, with nothing to read, nothing to smoke, and practically nothing to talk about.

On the tenth day the Captain broke silence.

“Get ready the lots, Blowhard,” he said.  “It’s got to come to that.”

“Yes,” I answered drearily, “we’re getting thinner every day.”

Then, with the awful prospect of cannibalism before us, we drew lots.

I prepared the lots and held them to the Captain.  He drew the longer one.

“Which does that mean,” he asked, trembling between hope and despair.  “Do I win?”

“No, Bilge,” I said sadly, “you lose.”

* * * * *

But I mustn’t dwell on the days that followed—­the long quiet days of lazy dreaming on the raft, during which I slowly built up my strength, which had been shattered by privation.  They were days, dear reader, of deep and quiet peace, and yet I cannot recall them without shedding a tear for the brave man who made them what they were.

It was on the fifth day after that I was awakened from a sound sleep by the bumping of the raft against the shore.  I had eaten perhaps overheartily, and had not observed the vicinity of land.

Before me was an island, the circular shape of which, with its low, sandy shore, recalled at once its identity.

“The treasure island,” I cried, “at last I am rewarded for all my heroism.”

In a fever of haste I rushed to the centre of the island.  What was the sight that confronted me?  A great hollow scooped in the sand, an empty dress-suit case lying beside it, and on a ship’s plank driven deep into the sand, the legend, “Saucy Sally, October, 1867.”  So! the miscreants had made good the vessel, headed it for the island of whose existence they must have learned from the chart we so carelessly left upon the cabin table, and had plundered poor Bilge and me of our well-earned treasure!